Corn (maize to Europeans) is Mexico’s greatest gift to the world. Nurtured by Mexican farmers over the last 10,000 years, it ranks with potatoes as the most calorie-productive crop in the world.

Notoriously, the NAFTA agreement of a quarter of a century ago steamrolled small Mexican corn farmers in favor of Midwestern mass producers. The first Bush Administration knew that NAFTA would increase illegal immigration, but it didn’t care.

MEXICO CITY — From the hundreds of millions of tortillas consumed every year to the countless tons of corn-enriched feed that fattens livestock and poultry, corn is perhaps Mexico’s most important agricultural commodity, one at the center of its life and culture.

Now corn has taken on a new role — as a powerful lever for Mexican officials in the run-up to talks over Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The reason: Much of the corn that Mexico consumes comes from the United States, making it America’s top agricultural export to its southern neighbor. And even though President Trump appears to be pulling back from his vows to completely overhaul Nafta, Mexico has taken his threats to heart and has begun flexing its own muscle.

The Mexican government is exploring buying its corn elsewhere — including Argentina or Brazil — as well as increasing domestic production. In a fit of political pique, a Mexican senator even submitted a bill to eliminate corn purchases from the United States within three years. …

American corn shipments to Mexico totaled nearly $2.6 billion last year and are part of an elaborate agricultural trade relationship between the two nations that has helped to interlace their economies.

As I’ve often pointed out, the NYT tends to employ first rate reporters, but it strikes a devil’s deal with them: rather than put the interesting news at the beginning of the article, the good stuff gets hidden away at the end. NYT reporters are significantly smarter than NYT subscribers, but they are only allowed to disturb the worldviews of the small fraction who read all the way to the end.

For example, here’s the 34th of 36 paragraphs:

Some economists blame Nafta for causing widespread unemployment in the Mexican agricultural sector by opening the floodgates to heavily subsidized American agricultural products, especially corn. A 2014 study estimated that 1.9 million agricultural jobs were wiped out, mainly those of small family farmers, helping to drive more illegal immigration into the United States.

You might call that, at minimum, cultural appropriation.

So, in return for $2.6 billion in corn sales, plus other crops, NAFTA put 1.9 million Mexican peons out of work, many of whom illegally migrated to the U.S., where taxpayers are paying for their children’s education, their medical care, and their imprisonment and food stamps.

This paper compares the performance of the Mexican economy with that of the rest of the region over the past 20 years, based on the available economic and social indicators, and with its own past economic performance. Among the results it finds that Mexico ranks 18th out of 20 Latin American countries in growth of real GDP per person, the most basic economic measure of living standards; Mexico’s poverty rate of in 2012 was almost identical to the poverty rate of 1994; real (inflation-adjusted) wages for Mexico were almost the same in 2012 as in 1994; and unemployment has increased significantly. It also notes that if NAFTA had been successful in restoring Mexico’s pre-1980 growth rate – when developmentalist economic policies were the norm – Mexico today would be a relatively high income country, with income per person significantly higher than that of Portugal or Greece. It is unlikely that immigration reform would be a major political issue in the United States, since relatively few Mexicans would seek to cross the border.

It’s almost as if NAFTA benefited capitalists on both sides of the border, such as Carlos Slim, at the expense of labor.

Mexico’s economy has grown an average of just 2.5 percent a year under Nafta, a fraction of what was needed to provide the jobs and prosperity its supporters promised. More than half of Mexicans still live below the poverty line, a proportion that remains unchanged from 1993, before the deal went into effect.

Wages in Mexico have stagnated for more than a decade, and the stubborn gap between the nation’s rich and poor persists. A majority of workers in Mexico toil in the obscurity of under-the-table jobs at workshops, markets and farms for their survival.

New technologies, meanwhile, have cut many jobs while increasing productivity, which is good news for businesses but a blow to the work force.

“Mexico is seeing exactly the same phenomenon as in the United States,” said Timothy A. Wise, a research fellow at Tufts University. “Workers have declining bargaining power on both sides of the border.”

So, in return for $2.6 billion in corn sales, plus other crops, NAFTA put 1.9 million Mexican peons out of work, many of whom illegally migrated to the U.S., where taxpayers are paying for their children’s education, their medical care, and their imprisonment and food stamps.

What kind of deal is that?

As always, compared to what?

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?

This misses the key point that Mickey Kaus drives home better than anybody else: the best way to make people happy is to reward them duly in their own culture, and in their own economic context -- not to force them to immigrate elsewhere to earn more money perhaps, but in an economic context where the money doesn't get them half as far, and where they are separated from their loved ones.

Really, for the people, nationalism is pretty much everywhere the best solution.

The only people who really profit from globalism are the elite capitalists and diversity activists.

Compared to allowing Mexican corn farmers to gradually invest in modern methods and increase their yields. Many farmers would still have been pushed out of the industry, but at least not all at once, and the Mexican economy would have had a chance at absorbing them.

Instead, we put them in sudden competition with American industrial agriculture, with results that were not only predictable, but predicted.

It was these corn farmers who were fueling Mexico's high birth rates. Having them move off their farms ultimately will lead to a less crowded and more prosperous Mexico and fewer illegal immigrants. Indeed, we have had roughly no net immigration from Mexico this decade.

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?

Yes. It is a vision for the sort of people who are perfectly suited for such a life, and for little else. People who would have been much happier staying home and farming their "godforsaken" patch of land if had remained at all viable. You know, not everybody is suited for a job at HuffPo making blanket pronouncements about what other people should strive for.

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?
Their lifestyle was over one way or another.

That's pretty freakin' trolling, haughty and dismissive and I have no love for Mexican invaders. Their lifestyle was good for another forty years and a gradual transition to more mechanized farming. Then we would not have had so much illegal immigration. Same as US policies greatly accelerated outsourcing and decimation of the US industrial base. Notice how the Japanese did not do this. They outsource old industries but keep their newer world class ones for who? Why for the Japanese people.

The whole idea of some US factories going abroad very slowly and to retain tariffs would have been OK

That is an arrogant statement . None of knows what the future holds and it maybe that the time will come when some of us might envy "a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick" . And it seems like hubris that people who get those same "peons" to pick their veggies and mow their lawns should be so contemptuous of them .

Who cares as opposed to what? Peons in Mexico planting corn with sticks are the problem of Mexico and Mexicans. The only thing bothering me is they've come here to invade and destroy Americans' lifestyle.

So perhaps my answer is: "As opposed to them staying peons on Mexico planting corn with a stick and not hoovering up resources from Americans in the ways Steve enumerated."

This hippy dippy unspoken assumption that all mankind are best good pals in it together must stop. No one on the planet is playing that game except white people, and those others are all laughing into their sleeves at the hilarity of our compassionate suicide.

Who cares as opposed to what? Peons in Mexico planting corn with sticks are the problem of Mexico and Mexicans. The only thing bothering me is they've come here to invade and destroy Americans' lifestyle.

So perhaps my answer is: "As opposed to them staying peons on Mexico planting corn with a stick and not hoovering up resources from Americans in the ways Steve enumerated."

This hippy dippy unspoken assumption that all mankind are best good pals in it together must stop. No one on the planet is playing that game except white people, and those others are all laughing into their sleeves at the hilarity of our compassionate suicide.

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iSteve could be the catalyst for a “Fair Trade Corn” movement among Millennial Hipster types. Hype up some heirloom and heritage strains of corn and the artisanal, traditional methods of corn production for use in their street taco tortillas etc. Let’s get the Hipsters to unwittingly pay to keep Mexican peasants . . . in Mexico . . .

The corrupt globalizer Ronald Reagan and the Bush Organized Crime Family were the ones that cooked up the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA). The globalizer baby boomers Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich rammed NAFTA through the US Congress.

Ronald Reagan was an evil dirtbag who gave amnesty to millions of illegal alien invaders in 1986. Reagan was the treasonous rat who killed the Republican Party in California. The Bush and Clinton organized crime families were just the mop up or clean up crew who made sure that mass immigration and trade deal scams finished off what was left of national sovereignty in the United States.

Mass immigration was designed to destroy European Christian nation-states. Trade deal scams were designed to destroy national sovereignty and pauperize Whites Without College Degrees(WWCDs).

The United States, France, Germany, England, Sweden and the Netherlands are all headed for civil war; mass immigration will be the cause of those wars.

Amnesty was done with the help of the Senate. 33 members of the Senate in 1986 were WWII veterans, only 3 baby boomers in the Senate. The average Senator in 1986 was born in 1929.The Greatest Generation really wanted to transform America for some reason.

the 1990 Immigration act was even more damaging to America. It expanded Legal Immigration by 50% , created the H1b visa program, created the diversity Lottery and ended the English requirement for naturalization. Even in 1990 24 WWII veterans were in Congress with just 3 baby boomers. The average Senator was born in 1933 in the 101st Congress.

The corrupt globalizer Ronald Reagan and the Bush Organized Crime Family were the ones that cooked up the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA). The globalizer baby boomers Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich rammed NAFTA through the US Congress.

Don't lump the great Ronald Reagan in with that Bush crowd, Mr. Pewitt! He was not of their ilk, nor a globalist like the Clintons and Bushes. Either you are a young fellow with no memory of the goings on in the 80's, or you are just full of it.

Let me turn Travis's reply around - maybe not "Amnesty was done with the help of the Senate", but "Amnesty was done by the Senate and House with the help of President Reagan's signature". This was 3 decades ago, but I was around, OK Charles? The deal was, that we would implement real border control, but to keep things more civil and compassionate ("compassionate" was more Bush's bit though), the alleged 3 million Mexicans would be amnestied as a 1-time thing, and people figured that number could be assimilated eventually. Reagan upheld his part of the deal, but the US Congress/Senate did not keep the word of their "leaders" in creating a real border control system.

Now, Reagan was a great patriotic American, unlike the scum you lump him in with - I was there, Charles. One of his faults was that he trusted the Americans in the US Congress more than he trusted the Soviet Russians. (Remember "trust, but verify", which actually means "don't trust"?) Reagan should have looked at the US Congresscritters with same wariness as he did the Evil Empire. He was too trusting of his fellow Americans in the Feral Government.

Reagan was the treasonous rat who killed the Republican Party in California. . Balderdash! He was the type that the establishment non-conservative Republicans wanted to keep out. Reagan was governor of California during the turbulent times of the '60's - the radicals couldn't stand him, but he stood up for real Californians then, just as he stood up for real Americans in the 80's. You should know that the Republican establishment on a national level wanted nothing to do with him, and got the (somewhat) goofball Jerry Ford the nomination in 1976 over Ronnie. Ronnie gave it a good shot in '76, but the establishment R's did not want him. He was like the Barry Goldwater of the 70's and '80's.

He did make mistakes due to his trust of his countrymen in power. Amnesty was one big one and the budget deficits were the other big one. In the latter case, the promise from Congress was that domestic spending would be curtailed to allow for the build-up in defense spending which would (and DID) end the Cold War. (There was a lot more to ending the Cold War than that, of course, but forcing the USSR into close to bankruptcy to keep up with "Star Wars" and the rest of the build-up was a big part of it.)

As to your last 2 paragraphs:

Mass immigration was designed to destroy European Christian nation-states. Trade deal scams were designed to destroy national sovereignty and pauperize Whites Without College Degrees(WWCDs).

The United States, France, Germany, England, Sweden and the Netherlands are all headed for civil war; mass immigration will be the cause of those wars.

I agree with you wholeheartedly.

Read some more history of the 1980's, Charles, if you don't know this stuff.

I wouldn't call him "Saint Ronnie", but Ronald Reagan was a great American. I would have no problem with the Catholic Church making him a Saint; there are apparently a lot of saints though, and they'd have to bump someone from the calendar. That'd be fine with me, but with that Commie Pope they've got up there now, I'll just be glad if they don't come up with St. Fidel's day, 5th Monday in February. To celebrate, we'll all drive in old junked-out 57 Chevys to the doctor for national free health care for check-ups for scurvy due to lack of fresh produce from the Peoples' Orchards.

I applaud Steve for having a open policy on comments but this comment is as over the top as anything whiskey or tiny duck writes. You can't take a minnow of truth and assume a whale of conspiracies. That immigration is not great for the USA is pretty much a given in this community, but that it is part of a mass conspiracy led by evil presidents leads to sane people ignoring the above statement we still have to prove to so much of the country.

Yes Charles! Excellent call. Also, as a tot my parents loved Reagan and during the reign of his successors they pines for him.

I didn't unseestand such things so I took their word for it.

For the past decade however I thought about things a bit and learned a bit more and came to notice that behind that cheery demeanor and possibly good intent was the Destroyer of my country. None of that politically correct bullshit had any power until Reagan let them have it in exchange for his economics that, for the first time since the Hoovervilles, gave every favor to the rich and every expectorant to the poor.

Between 1930 and 1985 the rising tide was lifting all ships and the median White person was getting a better and better life.

Reagan turnes the ship over and it has been sinking ever since.

I have never reaceived anything but calumny from Lifer Republicans for sharing this. But maybe this is an idea whose time has come.

Reagan seems like a great guy to go wild on the town with but if anyone else had been president at that time - including the deranged melaised man - America would not be on its way into oblivion at this point.

A majority of workers in Mexico toil in the obscurity of under-the-table jobs at workshops, markets and farms for their survival.

As opposed to this reporter who is having a meaningful impact on the world.

The implication is that unless your job is registered with the government for tax-taking purposes and unless it’s a free-form act of self-expression — certainly not about survival — you are sorely oppressed. Poor Mexican workers don’t just work, they toil, and they toil in the obscurity, not in factories but in workshops. The horror.

Exactly. Toiling in the obscurity of under-the-table jobs at workshops, markets, and farms doing honest work making growing and selling things people need is prole.

Deplorable losers suffer the calumny of putting food on the table and shelter over the heads of refined people like NYT writers.

Meanwhile, working class Mexicans get married and have two kids each (on average). New York Times writers mostly grow old with their cats, surrounded by furballs while Mexicans face the indignity of playing games with their grandchildren.

And the obscurity! Can you imagine living a life where your name is never on the august pages of the Times? A sad, sad world where the only ones that remember you are your kids, their kids, all their spouses and cousins, your friendly and easygoing neighbors, and various other deplorable toilers that you toiled with. Truly awful when you could be remembered in a future century for one brief second by some 14 year old forced to look up a footnote from an old newspaper in the school library.

It is rather like Clinton’s trade actions steamrollering Haitian rice producers in favor of Florida rice growers, leading to many Haitian rice farmer leaving the country side and moving to Port au Prince, and thus probably increasing the number of people living in substandard homes who were killed in the earthquake disaster of 2010.

This in turn contributed to an increase in Haitians fleeing the country, first to Brazil, whose economy has collapsed somewhat since the Olympics and World Cup, eventually leading to the current situation of refugee camps crowed with thousands of Haitians on the Mexican side of the border in Tijuana where they are being helped by Mexican churches.

I’m becoming keen on the Mao standard. As in: did advising people to avoid eating fat and meat, and to eat more starch instead, kill more people than Mao? Or, agricultural subsidies and tariffs: have they killed more people than Mao?

Unlike the questions used in newspaper headlines, the usual answer to my questions is “yes”.

I don't know, 40,000,000 people is a high bar, Dearieme. I'd say "no" to your 2 questions here, though I'm not arguing they may have made many people miserable. For the 1st question also, advise does not have to be taken - that diet may have been bad for people that listen to any damn advise that people from the government give them, but it's a lot different from starving to death due to economic changes forced on people at the local level at the point of a gun - Mao's way. RIP RIH* Chairman! The Long March to hell is paved with good intentions.

So, in return for $2.6 billion in corn sales, plus other crops, NAFTA put 1.9 million Mexican peons out of work, many of whom illegally migrated to the U.S., where taxpayers are paying for their children’s education, their medical care, and their imprisonment and food stamps.

What kind of deal is that?

The kind of deal wherein Corny Cosmopoliethnocentrics will continue to make sweet and unsolicited love with ordinary people all around the world, until a quest for Holly Global Peonization is not fully realized.

They literally dream of America as Atlantis that misteriously sunk into Jeb’s Sea of Love.

Besides Esperanto, the language of pitchforks is the only one these Two-Percenters will understand.

“There are means by which we can control our border better than we have.

And there should be penalties for breaking the law,” Jeb Bush added.

“But the way I look at this — and I’m going to say this, and it’ll be on tape and so be it.

The way I look at this is someone who comes to our country because they couldn’t come legally, they come to our country because their families — the dad who loved their children — was worried that their children didn’t have food on the table.

And they wanted to make sure their family was intact, and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family.

Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love.

It’s an act of commitment to your family.

I honestly think that that is a different kind of crime that there should be a price paid, but it shouldn’t rile people up that people are actually coming to this country to provide for their families.”

The Deep Sh*t State Nine Operatives, Uniparty Scions, Main Smear Media Scribes, Cosmopoliethnocentrics,Slander Properly Center, and other Two-Percenting Usury Suspects yelled in unison back at him from their brand new quadrillion dollar Noah’s Submarine :

Blockades are pretty effective, aren't they? Not to mention capturing and returning any such vessels evading the blockade. If Europeans are serious about protecting themselves, this would not be a problem.

One thing that may have contributed to this was NAFTA essentially ending Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution:

The preparations for NAFTA included cancellation of Article 27 of Mexico’s constitution, the cornerstone of Emiliano Zapata’s revolution of 1910–1919. Under the historic Article 27, Indian communal landholdings were protected from sale or privatization. However, this barrier to investment was incompatible with NAFTA. With the removal of Article 27, Indian farmers feared the loss of their remaining lands, and also feared cheap imports (substitutes) from the US. Thus, the Zapatistas labelled NAFTA as a “death sentence” to Indian communities all over Mexico. Then EZLN declared war on the Mexican state on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA came into force…

Article 27 does/did also have this very nationalistic clause:

Foreign nationals cannot own land within 100 km of the borders or 50 km of the coast; however, foreigners can have a beneficial interest in such land through a trust (fideicomiso), where the legal ownership of the land is held by a Mexican financial institution. The only precondition sine qua non to granting such a beneficial interest is that the foreigner agree that all matters relating to such land are the exclusive domain of Mexican courts and Mexican jurisdiction, and that in all issues pertaining to such land, the foreigner will conduct him or herself as a Mexican, and settle any issues arising from their interest in such land exclusively through Mexican courts and institutions. The stipulated consequence of a failure to abide by these terms is forfeiture to the nation of their interests in all lands where the foreigner has such beneficial interests.
That an area of land at the coast (20 meters from the highest tide line) is federal property which cannot be sold.

Indeed, anything resembling truth is buried deep inside The New York Pravda.

This time the truth is that not only are the working people of the United States engaged in a struggle for quality of life, but their counterparts on the other side are as well. All this is happening while our mutual owners and feeders move labor around at will.

Marxists would call this a class struggle, when in fact it is simply a renewed fight for independence, for the power of Citizens to run their own country for their own benefit. Inside our borders, we should be free to profit and negotiate and legislate (as we have at times!)

As a distinct organ of the human world’s body, the US functioned beautifully. Top-down trade deals like NAFTA drove a knife through that organ, so that it now bleeds out and lets infection in.

Corporate agriculture is just as much of a deadly parasite as Carlos Slim’s cellphone empire and the finance-insurance economy. Together, they all benefit from NAFTA and Pravda at the expense of everyone else.

Now it is clear that they suck the blood out of both organs of this particular, organic duality.

So, in return for $2.6 billion in corn sales, plus other crops, NAFTA put 1.9 million Mexican peons out of work, many of whom illegally migrated to the U.S., where taxpayers are paying for their children’s education, their medical care, and their imprisonment and food stamps.

What kind of deal is that?

As always, compared to what?

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?

Their lifestyle was over one way or another.

This misses the key point that Mickey Kaus drives home better than anybody else: the best way to make people happy is to reward them duly in their own culture, and in their own economic context — not to force them to immigrate elsewhere to earn more money perhaps, but in an economic context where the money doesn’t get them half as far, and where they are separated from their loved ones.

Really, for the people, nationalism is pretty much everywhere the best solution.

The only people who really profit from globalism are the elite capitalists and diversity activists.

This is clearly true. Once you clear a certain baseline of material needs, happiness is derived much more by relative than absolute success. Opinion shapers pretend not to understand this, with their talk of positive-sum free trade and geographical mobility. But I suspect they understand it perfectly well.

After all, pointing to the absolute gains of minorities et al is no defense against even the slightest Gap in achievement. It's clear to me then that their mindset is very much zero sum -- positive sum thinking is an attempt to pool the wool over the eyes of the yokels.

The let them eat nationalism/culture etc. argument only goes so far, and the people who tend to make the argument tend not to practice what they preach and abstain from global supply chains and the like.

The corrupt globalizer Ronald Reagan and the Bush Organized Crime Family were the ones that cooked up the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA). The globalizer baby boomers Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich rammed NAFTA through the US Congress.

Ronald Reagan was an evil dirtbag who gave amnesty to millions of illegal alien invaders in 1986. Reagan was the treasonous rat who killed the Republican Party in California. The Bush and Clinton organized crime families were just the mop up or clean up crew who made sure that mass immigration and trade deal scams finished off what was left of national sovereignty in the United States.

Mass immigration was designed to destroy European Christian nation-states. Trade deal scams were designed to destroy national sovereignty and pauperize Whites Without College Degrees(WWCDs).

The United States, France, Germany, England, Sweden and the Netherlands are all headed for civil war; mass immigration will be the cause of those wars.

Amnesty was done with the help of the Senate. 33 members of the Senate in 1986 were WWII veterans, only 3 baby boomers in the Senate. The average Senator in 1986 was born in 1929.
The Greatest Generation really wanted to transform America for some reason.

the 1990 Immigration act was even more damaging to America. It expanded Legal Immigration by 50% , created the H1b visa program, created the diversity Lottery and ended the English requirement for naturalization. Even in 1990 24 WWII veterans were in Congress with just 3 baby boomers. The average Senator was born in 1933 in the 101st Congress.

Good points. A lot of people blame all the problems on the baby boomers. But Clinton, little Bush and now Trump have been the only boomer presidents. Technically Obama is a boomer too, but to me the real boomers are the late 1940s-1950s cohort.

It seems like the Greatest Generation and the one preceding it laid the foundations for the predicament we find ourselves in. Not that the boomers are to be lauded. I doubt they will even try to correct it. But those other generations actually sowed what we reaping now.

The so-called "Greatest Generation" has been sacrosanct for far too long. Other than making the world safe for communism and globalism, I rather fail to see what's so great about them. They're hardly the only age bracket to have participated in armed conflict.

Greatest Generation? I don't call them the "Greatest Generation." Ronald Reagan and the rest of the "Greatest Generation" politicians were a bunch of bought off bastards who put the American Empire on the road to ruin with their trade, monetary, immigration and foreign policies.

Tom Brokaw is the lousy corporate propaganda whore who was allowed to go on and on about the so-called "Greatest Generation" in the mass media. I would call them the greatest generation of nation-wreckers ever seen before on planet earth. It was the so-called "Greatest Generation" that killed about 60,000 Americans in Vietnam in a war that should never have been fought.

It seems like the baby boomers saw the bad policies pushed by the so-called "Greatest Generation" and, in a marijuana-induced stupor, they decided to top them with crummy policies of their own. Both generations used financialization to enrich themselves and set up future generations with a millstone of unpayable government debt. To hell with both of them.

The Immigration Act of 1990, pushed by Teddy Kennedy and George HW Bush, was a disaster enacted into law close on the heels of Reagan's 1986 amnesty for illegal alien invaders. Most of us remember Bushy Boy #1 talking about the glories of open borders mass immigration and open borders free trade. Bushy Boy #1 was a bullshit artist who knew damn well that open borders mass immigration and open borders free trade would destroy the living standards of Whites Without College Degrees(WWCDs). Bushy Boy #1 was an enemy to the ordinary patriotic people of the United States.

So, in return for $2.6 billion in corn sales, plus other crops, NAFTA put 1.9 million Mexican peons out of work, many of whom illegally migrated to the U.S., where taxpayers are paying for their children’s education, their medical care, and their imprisonment and food stamps.

What kind of deal is that?

As always, compared to what?

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?

Their lifestyle was over one way or another.

> As always, compared to what?

Compared to allowing Mexican corn farmers to gradually invest in modern methods and increase their yields. Many farmers would still have been pushed out of the industry, but at least not all at once, and the Mexican economy would have had a chance at absorbing them.

Instead, we put them in sudden competition with American industrial agriculture, with results that were not only predictable, but predicted.

Compared to allowing Mexican corn farmers to gradually invest in modern methods and increase their yields. Many farmers would still have been pushed out of the industry, but at least not all at once, and the Mexican economy would have had a chance at absorbing them.

Instead, we put them in sudden competition with American industrial agriculture, with results that were not only predictable, but predicted.

Basically, they were so obsolete at corn farming they were obliterated at the first competition.

Preserving a cultural/economy that archaic, or incrementally modernizing, would effectively be creating sort of a bunch of mexican amish, anachronisms.

I think most mexican peons would rather join the modern world rather than remaining as part of a living archaic cultural anthropology exhibit.

This misses the key point that Mickey Kaus drives home better than anybody else: the best way to make people happy is to reward them duly in their own culture, and in their own economic context -- not to force them to immigrate elsewhere to earn more money perhaps, but in an economic context where the money doesn't get them half as far, and where they are separated from their loved ones.

Really, for the people, nationalism is pretty much everywhere the best solution.

The only people who really profit from globalism are the elite capitalists and diversity activists.

This is clearly true. Once you clear a certain baseline of material needs, happiness is derived much more by relative than absolute success. Opinion shapers pretend not to understand this, with their talk of positive-sum free trade and geographical mobility. But I suspect they understand it perfectly well.

After all, pointing to the absolute gains of minorities et al is no defense against even the slightest Gap in achievement. It’s clear to me then that their mindset is very much zero sum — positive sum thinking is an attempt to pool the wool over the eyes of the yokels.

It was known ahead of time that this would lead to a mass migration and it was probably secretly agreed to absorb Mexico’s population surplus as part of the deal. Notice how all this bi-lingual nonsense was implemented from the top down. There was no need for it way back when they first started to impose it. The trade deals were a long time in the planning and then implementation; they weren’t just something that spontaneously happened.

Should U.S, farmers fail to predict an entirely predictable increase in South American corn production, and global prices dropped due to a glut in supply to the point where it would be left to rot in the fields (I can't imagine such a price point, as corn is very storable, and doesn't use immigrant labor to harvest), it would only be a season before the fields were repurposed for something more lucrative. (Not even taking into account price under-cutting strategies).

Amnesty was done with the help of the Senate. 33 members of the Senate in 1986 were WWII veterans, only 3 baby boomers in the Senate. The average Senator in 1986 was born in 1929.The Greatest Generation really wanted to transform America for some reason.

the 1990 Immigration act was even more damaging to America. It expanded Legal Immigration by 50% , created the H1b visa program, created the diversity Lottery and ended the English requirement for naturalization. Even in 1990 24 WWII veterans were in Congress with just 3 baby boomers. The average Senator was born in 1933 in the 101st Congress.

Good points. A lot of people blame all the problems on the baby boomers. But Clinton, little Bush and now Trump have been the only boomer presidents. Technically Obama is a boomer too, but to me the real boomers are the late 1940s-1950s cohort.

It seems like the Greatest Generation and the one preceding it laid the foundations for the predicament we find ourselves in. Not that the boomers are to be lauded. I doubt they will even try to correct it. But those other generations actually sowed what we reaping now.

most of the so-called 60s was lead by men born prior to the baby boom. Not just the notable cultural icons like Bobby Dylan, Jim Morrison, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, The Grateful Dead, Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Hunter S. Thompson, jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepard, etc... in fact it is hard to finds a notable boomer among the important figures of the 60s, they were lead by the Silent generation, as was the Civil Rights movement, the anti-War movement, the Femisnists movement...

Politics were dominated by the Greatest Generation until 1992, when most of the political damage had been done. Boomers do not deserve much of the blame. The Silent Generation did more damage and had more political power until the late 90s. Even in the year 2000 the average Senator was 61 years old, born in 1939, 7 years before the boomers.

NAFTA caused poverty among the poor Mexicans, how does that work? Take a look at poverty rates in the US and note that those living below the poverty line, increased steadily under Obama. Let the Mexicans keep their corn and offer incentives to scientist to discover further uses for this remarkable crop. Brazil, which can barely feed their populous, is in no shape to ship corn to Mexico. Let the Pope tell his homeland, Argentina, to feed their corn for free to the Venezuelans.

Brazil can more than feed its own population. To the extent that there is hunger in Brazil, as is the case in most instances where people go hungry, the cause is lack of economic resources to buy food, not lack of food supply. Brazil is an agricultural powerhouse - the world's largest exporter of coffee, soybeans, beef, and ethanol (made from sugar cane). And it has the world's largest reserve of arable land that could be put into production someday. If the US was somehow excluded from the Mexican corn market, Mexican peasants would not go back to hoeing their little corn patches - that's pretty much irreversible (and a lot of Mexican farm land is located on small plots and mountain slopes unsuited for mechanized agriculture) and the slack would be taken up by imports from somewhere.

Part of the problem that the US is experiencing now is that it's relative standing in the world is just not as good as it once was immediately following WWII when we had a perfectly intact (and supercharged by the war) manufacturing and agricultural sector while that in the rest of the world was either damaged by war or not yet developed.

So, in return for $2.6 billion in corn sales, plus other crops, NAFTA put 1.9 million Mexican peons out of work, many of whom illegally migrated to the U.S., where taxpayers are paying for their children’s education, their medical care, and their imprisonment and food stamps.

What kind of deal is that?

As always, compared to what?

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?

Their lifestyle was over one way or another.

It was these corn farmers who were fueling Mexico’s high birth rates. Having them move off their farms ultimately will lead to a less crowded and more prosperous Mexico and fewer illegal immigrants. Indeed, we have had roughly no net immigration from Mexico this decade.

Amnesty was done with the help of the Senate. 33 members of the Senate in 1986 were WWII veterans, only 3 baby boomers in the Senate. The average Senator in 1986 was born in 1929.The Greatest Generation really wanted to transform America for some reason.

the 1990 Immigration act was even more damaging to America. It expanded Legal Immigration by 50% , created the H1b visa program, created the diversity Lottery and ended the English requirement for naturalization. Even in 1990 24 WWII veterans were in Congress with just 3 baby boomers. The average Senator was born in 1933 in the 101st Congress.

The so-called “Greatest Generation” has been sacrosanct for far too long. Other than making the world safe for communism and globalism, I rather fail to see what’s so great about them. They’re hardly the only age bracket to have participated in armed conflict.

The so-called “Greatest Generation” has been sacrosanct for far too long.

A guy once told a group of us that we should be grateful to the Greatest Generation that we are not speaking German today. One of the guys in our group responded without hesitation, "too bad they didn't prevent us from speaking Spanish".

the Times does not capitalize acronyms over four letters (they only capitalize the first letter), so while the rest of the world uses NAFTA, the Times alone uses Nafta. The example cited in the column was Navy SEALs, which the Times insists on printing as Navy Seals, despite objections from readers and the Navy

I cannot agree more. This confusing practice originates in Europe and it's maddened me for more than a decade. It is an affectation which makes the writing less effective communication: the point of capitalising all letters in an acronym is to signal to readers that it is an acronym; removing that signal serves no other purpose than to make the writing less clear.

The example of the SEALs is illustrative because SPAWAR does in fact work with sea lions and dolphins; a headline about the navy's work with SEALs (activity by special operators) communicates something altogether different from one about its work with seals (a new deelopment in the programme for marine mammals).

As to the U.S. Navy's own objections being ignored: compare that disrespect for people risking their lives to defend the writers from Achmed and Muhammad the terrorists with the deference those writers would trip over themselves showing to Achmed and Muhammed: they'd be "an Oxford man," Muslim rather than Mohammedans or Islamists, and if their idol were mentioned peace would be exhorted upon him, etc. (On the vanishingly unlikely intersectional chance they were also self-mutilated freaks, mentally ill, or perverted, they would certainly by zer, xit, etc.!).

The study implies Mexico would have a Southern European level economy if it had stayed on its pre-Nafta trend.

The problem is that it does not have a Southern European genetic stock. The parts of Mexico that are primarily Southern European, especially around Monterrey and other parts of the interior North, already do have economies comparable to Greece/Spain. The areas that are primarily indian are comparable to Central America and Peru. Trade deals don’t trump demographics, and economists who ignore this should be themselves ignored.

Even in the north, except for a tiny elite that is all or mostly European, the average Mexican is Mestizo (generally speaking descended from a male Spaniard and a female Indio, so 1/2 European), not 100% Southern European. If you visit Spain the people are visibly different than the people on the street in Nuevo Leon. If you were to be blindfolded and released on the street in 30 seconds you would know which country you were in . I don't know of anywhere in Mexico (aside from isolated populations like Mennonite colonies) where the majority of population is made of people who are all or almost all European. So the idea that the people of the north have the same human potential as southern Europeans is a fantasy.

You’ve always suggested that Tina Fey was a bit less deluded than the typical Hollywood liberal, so I was curious what you thought of her calling out white women – and, particularly, colleged-educated white women – for either voting for Trump and not continuing to protest Trump. (What she wants is somewhat vague.)

“The thing that I kind of keep focusing on is the idea that we sort of need to hold the edges, that it’s sort of like a lot of this election was turned by kinda white college-educated women who would now maybe like to forget about this election and go back to watching HGTV and I would want to urge them, ‘You can’t look away,’” Fey said

Looks like the leaders of the Nice White Ladies are getting nervous that they’re losing their grip on white women and are cracking the herd whip to get them back into line.

White women are coming under increased pressure these days. Blacks and Hispanics were bitching at them during the women’s march thing and now Hollywood is coming down on them. Makes you wonder if college-educated white women will ever notice that their place on the victim totem poll is falling and that they might want to join the team of their husbands and sons.

NAFTA caused poverty among the poor Mexicans, how does that work? Take a look at poverty rates in the US and note that those living below the poverty line, increased steadily under Obama. Let the Mexicans keep their corn and offer incentives to scientist to discover further uses for this remarkable crop. Brazil, which can barely feed their populous, is in no shape to ship corn to Mexico. Let the Pope tell his homeland, Argentina, to feed their corn for free to the Venezuelans.

Brazil can more than feed its own population. To the extent that there is hunger in Brazil, as is the case in most instances where people go hungry, the cause is lack of economic resources to buy food, not lack of food supply. Brazil is an agricultural powerhouse – the world’s largest exporter of coffee, soybeans, beef, and ethanol (made from sugar cane). And it has the world’s largest reserve of arable land that could be put into production someday. If the US was somehow excluded from the Mexican corn market, Mexican peasants would not go back to hoeing their little corn patches – that’s pretty much irreversible (and a lot of Mexican farm land is located on small plots and mountain slopes unsuited for mechanized agriculture) and the slack would be taken up by imports from somewhere.

Part of the problem that the US is experiencing now is that it’s relative standing in the world is just not as good as it once was immediately following WWII when we had a perfectly intact (and supercharged by the war) manufacturing and agricultural sector while that in the rest of the world was either damaged by war or not yet developed.

Jack, Thank you for your reply and it brings up a couple of thoughts. Brazil's beef has been recently banned from import into most of Europe. If Brazil has a sustainable food crop and untapped arable land, then why not ship more immigrants and refugees there?

Part of the problem that the US is experiencing now is that it's relative standing in the world is just not as good as it once was immediately following WWII when we had a perfectly intact (and supercharged by the war) manufacturing and agricultural sector while that in the rest of the world was either damaged by war or not yet developed.

That's a strong point not mentioned very much. And it might well be the weak point in the sentence "Let's make America Great Again". This seems to imply to turn back the clock. The clock being world history.

The study implies Mexico would have a Southern European level economy if it had stayed on its pre-Nafta trend.

The problem is that it does not have a Southern European genetic stock. The parts of Mexico that are primarily Southern European, especially around Monterrey and other parts of the interior North, already do have economies comparable to Greece/Spain. The areas that are primarily indian are comparable to Central America and Peru. Trade deals don't trump demographics, and economists who ignore this should be themselves ignored.

Even in the north, except for a tiny elite that is all or mostly European, the average Mexican is Mestizo (generally speaking descended from a male Spaniard and a female Indio, so 1/2 European), not 100% Southern European. If you visit Spain the people are visibly different than the people on the street in Nuevo Leon. If you were to be blindfolded and released on the street in 30 seconds you would know which country you were in . I don’t know of anywhere in Mexico (aside from isolated populations like Mennonite colonies) where the majority of population is made of people who are all or almost all European. So the idea that the people of the north have the same human potential as southern Europeans is a fantasy.

So, in return for $2.6 billion in corn sales, plus other crops, NAFTA put 1.9 million Mexican peons out of work, many of whom illegally migrated to the U.S., where taxpayers are paying for their children’s education, their medical care, and their imprisonment and food stamps.

What kind of deal is that?

As always, compared to what?

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?

Their lifestyle was over one way or another.

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?

Yes. It is a vision for the sort of people who are perfectly suited for such a life, and for little else. People who would have been much happier staying home and farming their “godforsaken” patch of land if had remained at all viable. You know, not everybody is suited for a job at HuffPo making blanket pronouncements about what other people should strive for.

Almost every country in the world except for some seriously screwed up places has made or will make the transition to mechanized agriculture. It was not realistic or fair to expect millions of Mexicans to continue living at a subsistence standard. There was a time when 80% of Americans labored on the farm also and they did not all leave to become HuffPo pundits. Someone who is used to a life of hard agricultural labor may not be suited for a desk job but they can and do make excellent workers in construction, food processing, manufacturing, etc. Our problem with Mexicans in the US is not that they are unsuited for labor, it's that they are too well suited.

What was wrong was depriving them all of their livelihood and sending them to the US at a single stroke. The Mexican economy should have been allowed to develop naturally so that the workers could have found work in their own country producing goods and services for their own domestic market.

Steve, you could probably be inspired to write dozens of posts fully analyzing the NAFTA’s impact on both Mexican and American agriculture and its connection to White Death.

One fascinating character is former congress critter Dan Glickman, the Clinton era Secretary of Agriculture who was instrumental in the leading the post NAFTA move towards Concentrated Area Feeding Operations aka CAFOs. These massive corporate operations have soaked up much of the excessive production of both GMO corn and soybeans not dumped on Mexico. Today Glickman is a globalist bigwig at the Aspen Institute. Why Glickman is not as infamous among the Alt-Right as the evil Sackler family at Purdue Pharma , the scum behind the Oxycontin scourge, is beyond me.

CAFOs forced hundreds of thousands of family farmers out of pork, beef and poultry livestock and dairy production starting in the 90s. Then CAFO’s along with their meat packing partners became willing recruiters of the illegals aliens flooding in from south of the border post NAFTA.

Illegals working 60 hours a week at a CAFO in disgusting conditions need meth to stay on their feet. Soon, they figured there is more money in dealing it to the equally distressed white locals. Overworked broken down bodies need opiates, soon the Oxycontin and black tar heroin was not far behind.

Here is what is really sad. All up to date nutritionists urge men suffering from obesity and “Low-T” to stop eating poor quality grain fed pork, beef and chicken from CAFOs that are also loaded with estrogen and xenoestrogen compounds.

But the very same nutritionists are urging men to eat grass fed beef along with organic pork, chicken and dairy. Why? Because they contain the very fats essential to testosterone production and declining testosterone in middle age men is a huge factor in obesity, depression and all the other maladies advertized during NFL games.

Now thanks to NAFTA, you have to pay extra for the mostly imported from Australia, New Zealand and Argentina grass feed ground beef that back in the seventies American family farmers raised in abundance.

I am only a few years younger than you Steve, and I have radically transformed by body and health by swearing off industrialized agricultural protein.

You might have an argument for beef, where the fat is distributed in the tissue, but I will speak about the industry that I am familiar with, which is the poultry industry.

Before there was industrial chicken there was hardly any chicken at all - you can't raise chickens on a large scale feeding them grass (they are not ruminants) or pecking at bugs. You can have a handful running around the barnyard but that's about it. That's why chicken was once a very special treat, not an everyday food. (In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye jokes that if a poor man eats a chicken then one of them is sick.)

"Organic" chickens get fed the same corn as any other chickens. "Pasture raised" chickens STILL get fed the same corn. Any chicken you buy is going to be corn fed - there's no other way to produce them on the scale needed to feed a large population. So you can pay a lot more money and still eat the same product like a hipster sucker. And the fat in chicken is not marbled in the meat but mostly in the skin and in distinct clumps that melt when the chicken is cooked, so if you eat boneless white meat (the most popular form) you are not getting much fat of any kind, good or bad. Chicken and eggs are both very high quality protein and also very inexpensive and you could do a lot worse than eating them, even in their "industrial" form.

The purpose of NAFTA was to compete with the EU, which was expanding rapidly in the early 1990s and was eventually expected to constitute a closed market of half a billion people. American business interests felt they needed a comparable market of their own to remain competitive.

However with the EU lurching from crisis to crisis and probably heading for complete collapse this consideration is now irrelevant.

Just as the EU was the solution to a problem that no longer exists (resurgent German Nazism) so NAFTA is the solution to a problem that’s rapidly ceasing to exist.

The purpose of NAFTA was to compete with the EU, which was expanding rapidly in the early 1990s and was eventually expected to constitute a closed market of half a billion people. American business interests felt they needed a comparable market of their own to remain competitive.

This was a major line of propaganda back then. I can see it has some validity but there were billions to be made in selling out American workers, the American industrial base and the Mexican people. I think the Mexicans got a better deal. They got to mass immigrate to America where many find new lives in construction, restaurants etc. Americans got the white death.

And there would have been no GATT without NAFTA. Someone posted Ronald Reagan started NAFTA. Not true in my book. It was the First George Bush.

Amnesty was done with the help of the Senate. 33 members of the Senate in 1986 were WWII veterans, only 3 baby boomers in the Senate. The average Senator in 1986 was born in 1929.The Greatest Generation really wanted to transform America for some reason.

the 1990 Immigration act was even more damaging to America. It expanded Legal Immigration by 50% , created the H1b visa program, created the diversity Lottery and ended the English requirement for naturalization. Even in 1990 24 WWII veterans were in Congress with just 3 baby boomers. The average Senator was born in 1933 in the 101st Congress.

Greatest Generation? I don’t call them the “Greatest Generation.” Ronald Reagan and the rest of the “Greatest Generation” politicians were a bunch of bought off bastards who put the American Empire on the road to ruin with their trade, monetary, immigration and foreign policies.

Tom Brokaw is the lousy corporate propaganda whore who was allowed to go on and on about the so-called “Greatest Generation” in the mass media. I would call them the greatest generation of nation-wreckers ever seen before on planet earth. It was the so-called “Greatest Generation” that killed about 60,000 Americans in Vietnam in a war that should never have been fought.

It seems like the baby boomers saw the bad policies pushed by the so-called “Greatest Generation” and, in a marijuana-induced stupor, they decided to top them with crummy policies of their own. Both generations used financialization to enrich themselves and set up future generations with a millstone of unpayable government debt. To hell with both of them.

The Immigration Act of 1990, pushed by Teddy Kennedy and George HW Bush, was a disaster enacted into law close on the heels of Reagan’s 1986 amnesty for illegal alien invaders. Most of us remember Bushy Boy #1 talking about the glories of open borders mass immigration and open borders free trade. Bushy Boy #1 was a bullshit artist who knew damn well that open borders mass immigration and open borders free trade would destroy the living standards of Whites Without College Degrees(WWCDs). Bushy Boy #1 was an enemy to the ordinary patriotic people of the United States.

Steve, you could probably be inspired to write dozens of posts fully analyzing the NAFTA's impact on both Mexican and American agriculture and its connection to White Death.

One fascinating character is former congress critter Dan Glickman, the Clinton era Secretary of Agriculture who was instrumental in the leading the post NAFTA move towards Concentrated Area Feeding Operations aka CAFOs. These massive corporate operations have soaked up much of the excessive production of both GMO corn and soybeans not dumped on Mexico. Today Glickman is a globalist bigwig at the Aspen Institute. Why Glickman is not as infamous among the Alt-Right as the evil Sackler family at Purdue Pharma , the scum behind the Oxycontin scourge, is beyond me.

CAFOs forced hundreds of thousands of family farmers out of pork, beef and poultry livestock and dairy production starting in the 90s. Then CAFO's along with their meat packing partners became willing recruiters of the illegals aliens flooding in from south of the border post NAFTA.

Illegals working 60 hours a week at a CAFO in disgusting conditions need meth to stay on their feet. Soon, they figured there is more money in dealing it to the equally distressed white locals. Overworked broken down bodies need opiates, soon the Oxycontin and black tar heroin was not far behind.

Here is what is really sad. All up to date nutritionists urge men suffering from obesity and "Low-T" to stop eating poor quality grain fed pork, beef and chicken from CAFOs that are also loaded with estrogen and xenoestrogen compounds.

But the very same nutritionists are urging men to eat grass fed beef along with organic pork, chicken and dairy. Why? Because they contain the very fats essential to testosterone production and declining testosterone in middle age men is a huge factor in obesity, depression and all the other maladies advertized during NFL games.

Now thanks to NAFTA, you have to pay extra for the mostly imported from Australia, New Zealand and Argentina grass feed ground beef that back in the seventies American family farmers raised in abundance.

I am only a few years younger than you Steve, and I have radically transformed by body and health by swearing off industrialized agricultural protein.

Looking forward to many more record breaking months ahead at ISTEVE.

I’d definitely be interested to see a post-Reagan history of workingman’s dope (uppers before work, downers after) in the red states as relates to economic change.

Steve, you could probably be inspired to write dozens of posts fully analyzing the NAFTA's impact on both Mexican and American agriculture and its connection to White Death.

One fascinating character is former congress critter Dan Glickman, the Clinton era Secretary of Agriculture who was instrumental in the leading the post NAFTA move towards Concentrated Area Feeding Operations aka CAFOs. These massive corporate operations have soaked up much of the excessive production of both GMO corn and soybeans not dumped on Mexico. Today Glickman is a globalist bigwig at the Aspen Institute. Why Glickman is not as infamous among the Alt-Right as the evil Sackler family at Purdue Pharma , the scum behind the Oxycontin scourge, is beyond me.

CAFOs forced hundreds of thousands of family farmers out of pork, beef and poultry livestock and dairy production starting in the 90s. Then CAFO's along with their meat packing partners became willing recruiters of the illegals aliens flooding in from south of the border post NAFTA.

Illegals working 60 hours a week at a CAFO in disgusting conditions need meth to stay on their feet. Soon, they figured there is more money in dealing it to the equally distressed white locals. Overworked broken down bodies need opiates, soon the Oxycontin and black tar heroin was not far behind.

Here is what is really sad. All up to date nutritionists urge men suffering from obesity and "Low-T" to stop eating poor quality grain fed pork, beef and chicken from CAFOs that are also loaded with estrogen and xenoestrogen compounds.

But the very same nutritionists are urging men to eat grass fed beef along with organic pork, chicken and dairy. Why? Because they contain the very fats essential to testosterone production and declining testosterone in middle age men is a huge factor in obesity, depression and all the other maladies advertized during NFL games.

Now thanks to NAFTA, you have to pay extra for the mostly imported from Australia, New Zealand and Argentina grass feed ground beef that back in the seventies American family farmers raised in abundance.

I am only a few years younger than you Steve, and I have radically transformed by body and health by swearing off industrialized agricultural protein.

Looking forward to many more record breaking months ahead at ISTEVE.

Why Glickman is not as infamous among the Alt-Right as the evil Sackler family at Purdue Pharma, the scum behind the Oxycontin scourge, is beyond me.

Outrage fatigue. There are just too many globalist vermin to hate all at once.

Good points. A lot of people blame all the problems on the baby boomers. But Clinton, little Bush and now Trump have been the only boomer presidents. Technically Obama is a boomer too, but to me the real boomers are the late 1940s-1950s cohort.

It seems like the Greatest Generation and the one preceding it laid the foundations for the predicament we find ourselves in. Not that the boomers are to be lauded. I doubt they will even try to correct it. But those other generations actually sowed what we reaping now.

exactly

most of the so-called 60s was lead by men born prior to the baby boom. Not just the notable cultural icons like Bobby Dylan, Jim Morrison, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, The Grateful Dead, Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Hunter S. Thompson, jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepard, etc… in fact it is hard to finds a notable boomer among the important figures of the 60s, they were lead by the Silent generation, as was the Civil Rights movement, the anti-War movement, the Femisnists movement…

Politics were dominated by the Greatest Generation until 1992, when most of the political damage had been done. Boomers do not deserve much of the blame. The Silent Generation did more damage and had more political power until the late 90s. Even in the year 2000 the average Senator was 61 years old, born in 1939, 7 years before the boomers.

The so-called "Greatest Generation" has been sacrosanct for far too long. Other than making the world safe for communism and globalism, I rather fail to see what's so great about them. They're hardly the only age bracket to have participated in armed conflict.

The so-called “Greatest Generation” has been sacrosanct for far too long.

A guy once told a group of us that we should be grateful to the Greatest Generation that we are not speaking German today. One of the guys in our group responded without hesitation, “too bad they didn’t prevent us from speaking Spanish”.

This misses the key point that Mickey Kaus drives home better than anybody else: the best way to make people happy is to reward them duly in their own culture, and in their own economic context -- not to force them to immigrate elsewhere to earn more money perhaps, but in an economic context where the money doesn't get them half as far, and where they are separated from their loved ones.

Really, for the people, nationalism is pretty much everywhere the best solution.

The only people who really profit from globalism are the elite capitalists and diversity activists.

The let them eat nationalism/culture etc. argument only goes so far, and the people who tend to make the argument tend not to practice what they preach and abstain from global supply chains and the like.

I agree, but I so purchase only products manufactured in the U.S.A. Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (excepting a few electronic devices it is literally impossible to obtain from a European nation; even then I make a point of purchasing products from Taiwan and Japan instead of China, etc.).

A problem is they now get you coming and going: I must sadly concede my belingings from Germany may well have been made by Turks, those from the U.S.A. by Mexicans, those from Canada by Chinese, etc. Thus, even meticulous research and principled adherence to strict requirements regariding nations of origin is increasingly a wasted effort.

In the event, the answer to the conundrum is to throw the invaders out and stem the incoming tide, and continue supporting only domestic industry and convincing others to, not to resignedly shrug and sigh "no one bothers now, so surely why not abandon the goal?"

Because of its size and its resources, the U.S.A. – perhaps uniquely among all modern nations save perhaps Russia (which lacks agricultural production; China, Brasil, and India lack energy and, for the latter two, human capital...) – is positioned to pull up the ladder and give everyone the raspberry. Yet the government doubles down on increasing her crippling interdependence at a time when economic stability and the very security and physical safety of its citizens point more than ever to the wisdom of autarky.

The corrupt globalizer Ronald Reagan and the Bush Organized Crime Family were the ones that cooked up the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA). The globalizer baby boomers Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich rammed NAFTA through the US Congress.

Ronald Reagan was an evil dirtbag who gave amnesty to millions of illegal alien invaders in 1986. Reagan was the treasonous rat who killed the Republican Party in California. The Bush and Clinton organized crime families were just the mop up or clean up crew who made sure that mass immigration and trade deal scams finished off what was left of national sovereignty in the United States.

Mass immigration was designed to destroy European Christian nation-states. Trade deal scams were designed to destroy national sovereignty and pauperize Whites Without College Degrees(WWCDs).

The United States, France, Germany, England, Sweden and the Netherlands are all headed for civil war; mass immigration will be the cause of those wars.

The corrupt globalizer Ronald Reagan and the Bush Organized Crime Family were the ones that cooked up the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA). The globalizer baby boomers Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich rammed NAFTA through the US Congress.

Don’t lump the great Ronald Reagan in with that Bush crowd, Mr. Pewitt! He was not of their ilk, nor a globalist like the Clintons and Bushes. Either you are a young fellow with no memory of the goings on in the 80′s, or you are just full of it.

Let me turn Travis’s reply around – maybe not “Amnesty was done with the help of the Senate”, but “Amnesty was done by the Senate and House with the help of President Reagan’s signature”. This was 3 decades ago, but I was around, OK Charles? The deal was, that we would implement real border control, but to keep things more civil and compassionate (“compassionate” was more Bush’s bit though), the alleged 3 million Mexicans would be amnestied as a 1-time thing, and people figured that number could be assimilated eventually. Reagan upheld his part of the deal, but the US Congress/Senate did not keep the word of their “leaders” in creating a real border control system.

Now, Reagan was a great patriotic American, unlike the scum you lump him in with – I was there, Charles. One of his faults was that he trusted the Americans in the US Congress more than he trusted the Soviet Russians. (Remember “trust, but verify”, which actually means “don’t trust”?) Reagan should have looked at the US Congresscritters with same wariness as he did the Evil Empire. He was too trusting of his fellow Americans in the Feral Government.

Reagan was the treasonous rat who killed the Republican Party in California. . Balderdash! He was the type that the establishment non-conservative Republicans wanted to keep out. Reagan was governor of California during the turbulent times of the ’60′s – the radicals couldn’t stand him, but he stood up for real Californians then, just as he stood up for real Americans in the 80′s. You should know that the Republican establishment on a national level wanted nothing to do with him, and got the (somewhat) goofball Jerry Ford the nomination in 1976 over Ronnie. Ronnie gave it a good shot in ’76, but the establishment R’s did not want him. He was like the Barry Goldwater of the 70′s and ’80′s.

He did make mistakes due to his trust of his countrymen in power. Amnesty was one big one and the budget deficits were the other big one. In the latter case, the promise from Congress was that domestic spending would be curtailed to allow for the build-up in defense spending which would (and DID) end the Cold War. (There was a lot more to ending the Cold War than that, of course, but forcing the USSR into close to bankruptcy to keep up with “Star Wars” and the rest of the build-up was a big part of it.)

As to your last 2 paragraphs:

Mass immigration was designed to destroy European Christian nation-states. Trade deal scams were designed to destroy national sovereignty and pauperize Whites Without College Degrees(WWCDs).

The United States, France, Germany, England, Sweden and the Netherlands are all headed for civil war; mass immigration will be the cause of those wars.

I agree with you wholeheartedly.

Read some more history of the 1980′s, Charles, if you don’t know this stuff.

I wouldn’t call him “Saint Ronnie”, but Ronald Reagan was a great American. I would have no problem with the Catholic Church making him a Saint; there are apparently a lot of saints though, and they’d have to bump someone from the calendar. That’d be fine with me, but with that Commie Pope they’ve got up there now, I’ll just be glad if they don’t come up with St. Fidel’s day, 5th Monday in February. To celebrate, we’ll all drive in old junked-out 57 Chevys to the doctor for national free health care for check-ups for scurvy due to lack of fresh produce from the Peoples’ Orchards.

Not really, Ronnie Reagan sided with the growers over Cesar Chavez which means he supported a lot of illegal immigrant farm workers. In fact by 1980 alone about 1.5 illegal immigrants already lived in California long before NAFTA. Prop 187 also occurred before NAFTA so the New York Times has an excused since not only 1.5 people left Mexico but it is more like 8 million. Not all the 8 million were displaced by NAFTA. Gerald Ford was a good guy in my book, he was not a right winger but Right wingers helped illegal immigration like Reagan by supporting the growers. Ford's problem was bringing in too many Vietnamese.

Should U.S, farmers fail to predict an entirely predictable increase in South American corn production, and global prices dropped due to a glut in supply to the point where it would be left to rot in the fields (I can’t imagine such a price point, as corn is very storable, and doesn’t use immigrant labor to harvest), it would only be a season before the fields were repurposed for something more lucrative. (Not even taking into account price under-cutting strategies).

Cloud, thank you. you are so right. Corn is storable and around here sometimes it doesn't get cut until spring. There is really no need for migrant labor in corn agriculture. Plant and harvest all by machine. However, the Amish around here sometimes pick field corn by hand and stack the stalks the old time way.

Farm work is decent, honorable work, unlike that of futures traders and bankster corporatists. Free Trade has become nothing but a false slogan for those outside the oligarchies, akin to calling the old Soviet commissar dictatorships “Peoples’ Republics.”

the Times does not capitalize acronyms over four letters (they only capitalize the first letter), so while the rest of the world uses NAFTA, the Times alone uses Nafta. The example cited in the column was Navy SEALs, which the Times insists on printing as Navy Seals, despite objections from readers and the Navy

This type of thing drives me nuts.

When I think of my biggest problems with what the NY Times prints, that is not #1 on my list.

In college, I had a class with a fat, loud, aggressively-shrill SJW who had a quasi Princess Leia-type haircut. She smelled like Old Spice. Her bizarre appearance and weird odor made the bullshit emanating from her mouth seem like just another manifestation of her nuttiness.

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?

Yes. It is a vision for the sort of people who are perfectly suited for such a life, and for little else. People who would have been much happier staying home and farming their "godforsaken" patch of land if had remained at all viable. You know, not everybody is suited for a job at HuffPo making blanket pronouncements about what other people should strive for.

Almost every country in the world except for some seriously screwed up places has made or will make the transition to mechanized agriculture. It was not realistic or fair to expect millions of Mexicans to continue living at a subsistence standard. There was a time when 80% of Americans labored on the farm also and they did not all leave to become HuffPo pundits. Someone who is used to a life of hard agricultural labor may not be suited for a desk job but they can and do make excellent workers in construction, food processing, manufacturing, etc. Our problem with Mexicans in the US is not that they are unsuited for labor, it’s that they are too well suited.

What was wrong was depriving them all of their livelihood and sending them to the US at a single stroke. The Mexican economy should have been allowed to develop naturally so that the workers could have found work in their own country producing goods and services for their own domestic market.

I'm becoming keen on the Mao standard. As in: did advising people to avoid eating fat and meat, and to eat more starch instead, kill more people than Mao? Or, agricultural subsidies and tariffs: have they killed more people than Mao?

Unlike the questions used in newspaper headlines, the usual answer to my questions is "yes".

I don’t know, 40,000,000 people is a high bar, Dearieme. I’d say “no” to your 2 questions here, though I’m not arguing they may have made many people miserable. For the 1st question also, advise does not have to be taken – that diet may have been bad for people that listen to any damn advise that people from the government give them, but it’s a lot different from starving to death due to economic changes forced on people at the local level at the point of a gun – Mao’s way. RIP RIH* Chairman! The Long March to hell is paved with good intentions.

Brazil can more than feed its own population. To the extent that there is hunger in Brazil, as is the case in most instances where people go hungry, the cause is lack of economic resources to buy food, not lack of food supply. Brazil is an agricultural powerhouse - the world's largest exporter of coffee, soybeans, beef, and ethanol (made from sugar cane). And it has the world's largest reserve of arable land that could be put into production someday. If the US was somehow excluded from the Mexican corn market, Mexican peasants would not go back to hoeing their little corn patches - that's pretty much irreversible (and a lot of Mexican farm land is located on small plots and mountain slopes unsuited for mechanized agriculture) and the slack would be taken up by imports from somewhere.

Part of the problem that the US is experiencing now is that it's relative standing in the world is just not as good as it once was immediately following WWII when we had a perfectly intact (and supercharged by the war) manufacturing and agricultural sector while that in the rest of the world was either damaged by war or not yet developed.

Jack, Thank you for your reply and it brings up a couple of thoughts. Brazil’s beef has been recently banned from import into most of Europe. If Brazil has a sustainable food crop and untapped arable land, then why not ship more immigrants and refugees there?

I read a recent article on Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants in the U.S. that was supposed to tug at the heartstrings -- a woman bemoaning that her husband was being deported, which would separate her family, etc. (details fuzzy)

Unless you noticed that the woman and her husband had originally been taken in from Haiti as legal refugees by Brazil and had only illegally gone to the U.S. to, essentially, shop for better benefits.

There was no humanitarian reason they couldn't have simply stayed in Brazil, but all of a sudden it was mean ol' 'murica's fault.

Not enough white people there to displace and persecute, that's why. The destruction of the race there is already continuing apace via miscegenation, so there is no incentive to accelerate it via invasion by additonal troops.

Carlos Slim benefits on both sides of the border. He made a fortune by buying off Mexican politicians to get a virtual telephone monopoly, where his fellow citizens were charged exorbitant rates. Then he leveraged that to buy other assets including La Putana Gris. What a guy.

Steve, you could probably be inspired to write dozens of posts fully analyzing the NAFTA's impact on both Mexican and American agriculture and its connection to White Death.

One fascinating character is former congress critter Dan Glickman, the Clinton era Secretary of Agriculture who was instrumental in the leading the post NAFTA move towards Concentrated Area Feeding Operations aka CAFOs. These massive corporate operations have soaked up much of the excessive production of both GMO corn and soybeans not dumped on Mexico. Today Glickman is a globalist bigwig at the Aspen Institute. Why Glickman is not as infamous among the Alt-Right as the evil Sackler family at Purdue Pharma , the scum behind the Oxycontin scourge, is beyond me.

CAFOs forced hundreds of thousands of family farmers out of pork, beef and poultry livestock and dairy production starting in the 90s. Then CAFO's along with their meat packing partners became willing recruiters of the illegals aliens flooding in from south of the border post NAFTA.

Illegals working 60 hours a week at a CAFO in disgusting conditions need meth to stay on their feet. Soon, they figured there is more money in dealing it to the equally distressed white locals. Overworked broken down bodies need opiates, soon the Oxycontin and black tar heroin was not far behind.

Here is what is really sad. All up to date nutritionists urge men suffering from obesity and "Low-T" to stop eating poor quality grain fed pork, beef and chicken from CAFOs that are also loaded with estrogen and xenoestrogen compounds.

But the very same nutritionists are urging men to eat grass fed beef along with organic pork, chicken and dairy. Why? Because they contain the very fats essential to testosterone production and declining testosterone in middle age men is a huge factor in obesity, depression and all the other maladies advertized during NFL games.

Now thanks to NAFTA, you have to pay extra for the mostly imported from Australia, New Zealand and Argentina grass feed ground beef that back in the seventies American family farmers raised in abundance.

I am only a few years younger than you Steve, and I have radically transformed by body and health by swearing off industrialized agricultural protein.

Looking forward to many more record breaking months ahead at ISTEVE.

You might have an argument for beef, where the fat is distributed in the tissue, but I will speak about the industry that I am familiar with, which is the poultry industry.

Before there was industrial chicken there was hardly any chicken at all – you can’t raise chickens on a large scale feeding them grass (they are not ruminants) or pecking at bugs. You can have a handful running around the barnyard but that’s about it. That’s why chicken was once a very special treat, not an everyday food. (In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye jokes that if a poor man eats a chicken then one of them is sick.)

“Organic” chickens get fed the same corn as any other chickens. “Pasture raised” chickens STILL get fed the same corn. Any chicken you buy is going to be corn fed – there’s no other way to produce them on the scale needed to feed a large population. So you can pay a lot more money and still eat the same product like a hipster sucker. And the fat in chicken is not marbled in the meat but mostly in the skin and in distinct clumps that melt when the chicken is cooked, so if you eat boneless white meat (the most popular form) you are not getting much fat of any kind, good or bad. Chicken and eggs are both very high quality protein and also very inexpensive and you could do a lot worse than eating them, even in their “industrial” form.

Obviously you provided more detail than I could in an already long article. The issues with industrial poultry involve largely antibiotics used by CAFOs. Estrogen is also less of an issue with pork. The FDA claims that both chicken and pork feed is free of estrogens in the US. They would not lie would they???

But both industrial pork and poultry may be contaminated with xenoestrogens or endocrine disrupting chemicals which are only beginning to become regulated.

The major endocrine disruptor BPA is still ubiquitous in the US. It is still widely use in industrial canning, packaging and in thermal printing paper (ie: receipt paper) which contaminates almost everything including paper money. The canning industry is making moves towards BPA free cans but is has been delayed numerous times.

If the Trump administration is smart it would accelerate the move away from the use of BPA in food processing and printing industries. No Trump supporter wants to be a "Low-T" male or married to one. Trump could eliminate much of the use of BPA overnight and win over lots of concerned soccer moms and environmentalists.

An agricultural policy encouraging the move away from CAFOs would be a huge voter winner in fly over America.

Post NAFTA, a huge issue in the poultry and pork industry is the contract CAFO phenomena where the producer is completely under the thumb of the major processors. The contract poultry and pork producer is reduced to near debt slavery. This has encouraged the use of illegal labor to meet extremely tight margins.

Chicken and eggs are both very high quality protein and also very inexpensive and you could do a lot worse than eating them, even in their “industrial” form.

That is a mostly true statement. The one time fear of eating eggs due to cholesterol has been debunked. Also most fitness forums advise, that if you are on a budget, you can safely eat chicken breasts and eggs until you "cluck".

Brazil can more than feed its own population. To the extent that there is hunger in Brazil, as is the case in most instances where people go hungry, the cause is lack of economic resources to buy food, not lack of food supply. Brazil is an agricultural powerhouse - the world's largest exporter of coffee, soybeans, beef, and ethanol (made from sugar cane). And it has the world's largest reserve of arable land that could be put into production someday. If the US was somehow excluded from the Mexican corn market, Mexican peasants would not go back to hoeing their little corn patches - that's pretty much irreversible (and a lot of Mexican farm land is located on small plots and mountain slopes unsuited for mechanized agriculture) and the slack would be taken up by imports from somewhere.

Part of the problem that the US is experiencing now is that it's relative standing in the world is just not as good as it once was immediately following WWII when we had a perfectly intact (and supercharged by the war) manufacturing and agricultural sector while that in the rest of the world was either damaged by war or not yet developed.

Part of the problem that the US is experiencing now is that it’s relative standing in the world is just not as good as it once was immediately following WWII when we had a perfectly intact (and supercharged by the war) manufacturing and agricultural sector while that in the rest of the world was either damaged by war or not yet developed.

That’s a strong point not mentioned very much. And it might well be the weak point in the sentence “Let’s make America Great Again”. This seems to imply to turn back the clock. The clock being world history.

I read 30 years ago that one reason people overeat is because they are unconsciously seeking the nutrients that bad food does not provide them.

I always thought this made sense and I don't know why it isn't bruited about more.

But note: one food manufacturer in Asia have told me that people who ate well in their youth (i.e. got good food from their mothers) will seek "dense" food but the modern young who graze on pot noodles etc. don't miss it because they have never had it.

The corrupt globalizer Ronald Reagan and the Bush Organized Crime Family were the ones that cooked up the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA). The globalizer baby boomers Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich rammed NAFTA through the US Congress.

Ronald Reagan was an evil dirtbag who gave amnesty to millions of illegal alien invaders in 1986. Reagan was the treasonous rat who killed the Republican Party in California. The Bush and Clinton organized crime families were just the mop up or clean up crew who made sure that mass immigration and trade deal scams finished off what was left of national sovereignty in the United States.

Mass immigration was designed to destroy European Christian nation-states. Trade deal scams were designed to destroy national sovereignty and pauperize Whites Without College Degrees(WWCDs).

The United States, France, Germany, England, Sweden and the Netherlands are all headed for civil war; mass immigration will be the cause of those wars.

I applaud Steve for having a open policy on comments but this comment is as over the top as anything whiskey or tiny duck writes. You can’t take a minnow of truth and assume a whale of conspiracies. That immigration is not great for the USA is pretty much a given in this community, but that it is part of a mass conspiracy led by evil presidents leads to sane people ignoring the above statement we still have to prove to so much of the country.

The corrupt globalizer Ronald Reagan and the Bush Organized Crime Family were the ones that cooked up the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA). The globalizer baby boomers Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich rammed NAFTA through the US Congress.

Ronald Reagan was an evil dirtbag who gave amnesty to millions of illegal alien invaders in 1986. Reagan was the treasonous rat who killed the Republican Party in California. The Bush and Clinton organized crime families were just the mop up or clean up crew who made sure that mass immigration and trade deal scams finished off what was left of national sovereignty in the United States.

Mass immigration was designed to destroy European Christian nation-states. Trade deal scams were designed to destroy national sovereignty and pauperize Whites Without College Degrees(WWCDs).

The United States, France, Germany, England, Sweden and the Netherlands are all headed for civil war; mass immigration will be the cause of those wars.

Yes Charles! Excellent call. Also, as a tot my parents loved Reagan and during the reign of his successors they pines for him.

I didn’t unseestand such things so I took their word for it.

For the past decade however I thought about things a bit and learned a bit more and came to notice that behind that cheery demeanor and possibly good intent was the Destroyer of my country. None of that politically correct bullshit had any power until Reagan let them have it in exchange for his economics that, for the first time since the Hoovervilles, gave every favor to the rich and every expectorant to the poor.

Between 1930 and 1985 the rising tide was lifting all ships and the median White person was getting a better and better life.

Reagan turnes the ship over and it has been sinking ever since.

I have never reaceived anything but calumny from Lifer Republicans for sharing this. But maybe this is an idea whose time has come.

Reagan seems like a great guy to go wild on the town with but if anyone else had been president at that time – including the deranged melaised man – America would not be on its way into oblivion at this point.

At the risk of being diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome (in the professional opinion of every seventh commenter, it seems every fifth commenter suffers the malady...): I am genuinely striving to make sense of your metaphor of the expectorant.

The context suggests the expectorant represents something harmful or malign, but expectorant does not merely induce coughing; it does so for medicinal and beneficial purposes (clearing excess mucous, etc.) and so is more akin to the incision of a lifesaving surgeon than the wound of a murderer. So Reagan's policies were inconvenient or painful to the poor but ultimately helped them...or...something?

How about "...every favour to the rich and every demand of the poor," as a substitute? (A demand is close to the opposite of a favour, so we've some parallel construction, too.)

It's just occurred to me, perhaps you meant "every expectation of the poor," with the idea being Reagan expected the poor to suffer the pitfalls of his policies.

In the event, I've mixed feelings about Reagan. The amnesty chaps my hide, but I was too young to recall any potential betrayals by the Congress to enforce the law thereafter, and I've never investigated the record. Any amnesty is always an invitation to future bad behaviour; anyone who's ever cared for children knows it. If the rules are not enforced always and to the letter, firmly but fairly, as we say, they become contemptible and they are disregarded. This truth is why I've no truck with the horseshit about a "path to citizenship" and all the rest of it that now even Trump is emanating, speaking of treachery....

So, in return for $2.6 billion in corn sales, plus other crops, NAFTA put 1.9 million Mexican peons out of work, many of whom illegally migrated to the U.S., where taxpayers are paying for their children’s education, their medical care, and their imprisonment and food stamps.

What kind of deal is that?

As always, compared to what?

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?

Their lifestyle was over one way or another.

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?
Their lifestyle was over one way or another.

That’s pretty freakin’ trolling, haughty and dismissive and I have no love for Mexican invaders. Their lifestyle was good for another forty years and a gradual transition to more mechanized farming. Then we would not have had so much illegal immigration. Same as US policies greatly accelerated outsourcing and decimation of the US industrial base. Notice how the Japanese did not do this. They outsource old industries but keep their newer world class ones for who? Why for the Japanese people.

The whole idea of some US factories going abroad very slowly and to retain tariffs would have been OK

Before there was industrial chicken there was hardly any chicken at all – you can’t raise chickens on a large scale feeding them grass (they are not ruminants) or pecking at bugs. You can have a handful running around the barnyard but that’s about it. That’s why chicken was once a very special treat, not an everyday food.

That is possibly why chicken used to cost about the same as beef, back in the 1920′s. And why a dozen eggs cost more than a pound of beef.

Steve, you could probably be inspired to write dozens of posts fully analyzing the NAFTA's impact on both Mexican and American agriculture and its connection to White Death.

One fascinating character is former congress critter Dan Glickman, the Clinton era Secretary of Agriculture who was instrumental in the leading the post NAFTA move towards Concentrated Area Feeding Operations aka CAFOs. These massive corporate operations have soaked up much of the excessive production of both GMO corn and soybeans not dumped on Mexico. Today Glickman is a globalist bigwig at the Aspen Institute. Why Glickman is not as infamous among the Alt-Right as the evil Sackler family at Purdue Pharma , the scum behind the Oxycontin scourge, is beyond me.

CAFOs forced hundreds of thousands of family farmers out of pork, beef and poultry livestock and dairy production starting in the 90s. Then CAFO's along with their meat packing partners became willing recruiters of the illegals aliens flooding in from south of the border post NAFTA.

Illegals working 60 hours a week at a CAFO in disgusting conditions need meth to stay on their feet. Soon, they figured there is more money in dealing it to the equally distressed white locals. Overworked broken down bodies need opiates, soon the Oxycontin and black tar heroin was not far behind.

Here is what is really sad. All up to date nutritionists urge men suffering from obesity and "Low-T" to stop eating poor quality grain fed pork, beef and chicken from CAFOs that are also loaded with estrogen and xenoestrogen compounds.

But the very same nutritionists are urging men to eat grass fed beef along with organic pork, chicken and dairy. Why? Because they contain the very fats essential to testosterone production and declining testosterone in middle age men is a huge factor in obesity, depression and all the other maladies advertized during NFL games.

Now thanks to NAFTA, you have to pay extra for the mostly imported from Australia, New Zealand and Argentina grass feed ground beef that back in the seventies American family farmers raised in abundance.

I am only a few years younger than you Steve, and I have radically transformed by body and health by swearing off industrialized agricultural protein.

Looking forward to many more record breaking months ahead at ISTEVE.

Family farms in the US were in decline in the 70s and most of the beef eaten back then was not grass fed.

Up until the mid 1990s North Carolina alone had well over 10,000 hog farmers. Now there are less than a thousand with most being CAFOs of over 10,000 hogs per operation.

In 1986, there were 15,000 farms with at least one head of hogs in the state. By the year 2006, there were only 2,300 such farms remaining.

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-recent/6257

CAFOs are really a phenomena of the last 25 years. Taking off in the post NAFTA years of the Clinton administration. So much for the Democrats claiming they were the party of the family farmer.

Cows are not natural grain feeders and stuffing them with corn and soybeans was once seen as a wasteful expedient to fat them up just before slaughter. Cattle CAFOs subsidies alone have cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars to produce an unhealthy unnatural product.

You might have an argument for beef, where the fat is distributed in the tissue, but I will speak about the industry that I am familiar with, which is the poultry industry.

Before there was industrial chicken there was hardly any chicken at all - you can't raise chickens on a large scale feeding them grass (they are not ruminants) or pecking at bugs. You can have a handful running around the barnyard but that's about it. That's why chicken was once a very special treat, not an everyday food. (In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye jokes that if a poor man eats a chicken then one of them is sick.)

"Organic" chickens get fed the same corn as any other chickens. "Pasture raised" chickens STILL get fed the same corn. Any chicken you buy is going to be corn fed - there's no other way to produce them on the scale needed to feed a large population. So you can pay a lot more money and still eat the same product like a hipster sucker. And the fat in chicken is not marbled in the meat but mostly in the skin and in distinct clumps that melt when the chicken is cooked, so if you eat boneless white meat (the most popular form) you are not getting much fat of any kind, good or bad. Chicken and eggs are both very high quality protein and also very inexpensive and you could do a lot worse than eating them, even in their "industrial" form.

Obviously you provided more detail than I could in an already long article. The issues with industrial poultry involve largely antibiotics used by CAFOs. Estrogen is also less of an issue with pork. The FDA claims that both chicken and pork feed is free of estrogens in the US. They would not lie would they???

But both industrial pork and poultry may be contaminated with xenoestrogens or endocrine disrupting chemicals which are only beginning to become regulated.

The major endocrine disruptor BPA is still ubiquitous in the US. It is still widely use in industrial canning, packaging and in thermal printing paper (ie: receipt paper) which contaminates almost everything including paper money. The canning industry is making moves towards BPA free cans but is has been delayed numerous times.

If the Trump administration is smart it would accelerate the move away from the use of BPA in food processing and printing industries. No Trump supporter wants to be a “Low-T” male or married to one. Trump could eliminate much of the use of BPA overnight and win over lots of concerned soccer moms and environmentalists.

An agricultural policy encouraging the move away from CAFOs would be a huge voter winner in fly over America.

The stuff you are talking about is just not in chicken unless maybe it's canned chicken breast in a tuna fish can (not a big seller). A whole chicken you buy in the supermarket is "minimally processed" - it's as close to what you would get if you raised your own as any product you can buy in the supermarket. Ditto eggs - what comes out of the bird is what you get. They wash it off, put in a box and that's it. There are all sorts of processed products out there - nuggets and such but if you buy a whole chicken then it's been gutted and plucked and that's it.

The media and the left will, of course, do everything they can to minimize this scandal. That it vindicates Trump’s claims of surveillance is only half of it — probably the smaller half. The bigger half is that it will forever stain the legacy of their Precious. That is the sacrilege they truly can’t abide.

But nothing could be more unsurprising than such amoral behavior among the Obama people. They, and the media, have given themselves permission to engage in any sort of activity in the fight against The New Hitler. Laws and moral rules mean nothing. This is as it always is when one demonizes one’s enemy. Beware of immoral and illegal behavior on one’s own side when one chooses to do that.

If Rice has done what it appears she has done, there will be a big price to pay with the American people — at least those with some moral compass, which I believe is most Americans.

So, in return for $2.6 billion in corn sales, plus other crops, NAFTA put 1.9 million Mexican peons out of work, many of whom illegally migrated to the U.S., where taxpayers are paying for their children’s education, their medical care, and their imprisonment and food stamps.

What kind of deal is that?

As always, compared to what?

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?

Their lifestyle was over one way or another.

That is an arrogant statement . None of knows what the future holds and it maybe that the time will come when some of us might envy “a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick” . And it seems like hubris that people who get those same “peons” to pick their veggies and mow their lawns should be so contemptuous of them .

Well said. Having agricultural land sounds really good to me, especially at this stage of life (I am an old fogey after all). One of my son's friends was wise enough when the market crashed to buy a parcel of land in the Hudson Valley that he rents out to local farmers. That was a great purchase as it also has a small house on it that can be easily made into an all-year residence.

The purpose of NAFTA was to compete with the EU, which was expanding rapidly in the early 1990s and was eventually expected to constitute a closed market of half a billion people. American business interests felt they needed a comparable market of their own to remain competitive.

However with the EU lurching from crisis to crisis and probably heading for complete collapse this consideration is now irrelevant.

Just as the EU was the solution to a problem that no longer exists (resurgent German Nazism) so NAFTA is the solution to a problem that's rapidly ceasing to exist.

The purpose of NAFTA was to compete with the EU, which was expanding rapidly in the early 1990s and was eventually expected to constitute a closed market of half a billion people. American business interests felt they needed a comparable market of their own to remain competitive.

This was a major line of propaganda back then. I can see it has some validity but there were billions to be made in selling out American workers, the American industrial base and the Mexican people. I think the Mexicans got a better deal. They got to mass immigrate to America where many find new lives in construction, restaurants etc. Americans got the white death.

And there would have been no GATT without NAFTA. Someone posted Ronald Reagan started NAFTA. Not true in my book. It was the First George Bush.

You might have an argument for beef, where the fat is distributed in the tissue, but I will speak about the industry that I am familiar with, which is the poultry industry.

Before there was industrial chicken there was hardly any chicken at all - you can't raise chickens on a large scale feeding them grass (they are not ruminants) or pecking at bugs. You can have a handful running around the barnyard but that's about it. That's why chicken was once a very special treat, not an everyday food. (In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye jokes that if a poor man eats a chicken then one of them is sick.)

"Organic" chickens get fed the same corn as any other chickens. "Pasture raised" chickens STILL get fed the same corn. Any chicken you buy is going to be corn fed - there's no other way to produce them on the scale needed to feed a large population. So you can pay a lot more money and still eat the same product like a hipster sucker. And the fat in chicken is not marbled in the meat but mostly in the skin and in distinct clumps that melt when the chicken is cooked, so if you eat boneless white meat (the most popular form) you are not getting much fat of any kind, good or bad. Chicken and eggs are both very high quality protein and also very inexpensive and you could do a lot worse than eating them, even in their "industrial" form.

Jack,

Post NAFTA, a huge issue in the poultry and pork industry is the contract CAFO phenomena where the producer is completely under the thumb of the major processors. The contract poultry and pork producer is reduced to near debt slavery. This has encouraged the use of illegal labor to meet extremely tight margins.

I’m equally skeptical of the lose/lose argument over US Corn production.

Do corn subsidies raise prices or lower prices?

I would argue that if you toss in ethanol — a truly evil subsidy — it has increased prices. It increased demand.

On the other hand, US farmers are amazing. Corn is under $4/bbl. They seem to be able to break even on a cash basis at this level, since they have been producing for a couple of years at this price point.

A couple of billion of corn sales won’t move the needle on US production, prices or anything else.

The how is fascinating, but it is bushels per acre that drives it.
If it hurt farmers in Mexico, it helped consumers.

One thing that has happened is that a lot more fruits and vegetables are now grown and imported into the US from Mexico. From personal observation in grocery stores.

That is more or less what should be happening. Mexico should keep their farm labor doing labor intensive stuff like produce in Mexico and the US should be doing capital intensive stuff like grain.

The US has ended up penalizing exports in all sorts of ways. However, unlike most of the world, the US has both producers and consumers who have political influence. Export oriented economies like Japan will rig their system to subsidize exports at the expense of their consumers.

Grain farming on a massive, air conditioned, GPS controlled John Deere tractor is a good US job. Stoop labor is a good Mexican job.

How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul
In the 1970s, a new wave of post-Watergate liberals stopped fighting monopoly power. The result is an increasingly dangerous political system.

What’s more, the new members were antiwar, not necessarily anti-bank. “Our generation did not know the Depression,” then-Representative Paul Tsongas said. “The populism of the 1930s doesn’t really apply to the 1970s,” argued Pete Stark, a California member who launched his political career by affixing a giant peace sign onto the roof of the bank he owned.

Ironically, as chairman of the Banking Committee, Patman had been the first Democrat to investigate the Watergate scandal. But he was vulnerable to the new crowd he had helped usher in. He was old; they were young. He had supported segregation in the past and the war in Vietnam; they were vehemently against both. Patman had never gone to college and had been a crusading economic populist during the Great Depression; the Watergate Babies were weaned on campus politics, television, and affluence.

In reality, while the Watergate Babies provided the numbers needed to eject him, it was actually Patman’s Banking Committee colleagues who orchestrated his ouster. For more than a decade, Patman had represented a Democratic political tradition stretching back to Thomas Jefferson, an alliance of the agrarian South and the West against Northeastern capital. For decades, Patman had sought to hold financial power in check, investigating corporate monopolies, high interest rates, the Federal Reserve, and big banks. And the banking allies on the committee had had enough of Patman’s hostility to Wall Street.

Over the years, Patman had upset these members by blocking bank mergers and going after financial power. As famed muckraking columnist Drew Pearson put it: Patman “committed one cardinal sin as chairman. … He wants to investigate the big bankers.” And so, it was the older bank allies who truly ensured that Patman would go down. In 1975, these bank-friendly Democrats spread the rumor that Patman was an autocratic chairman biased against junior congressmen. To new members eager to participate in policymaking, this was a searing indictment.

A majority of workers in Mexico toil in the obscurity of under-the-table jobs at workshops, markets and farms for their survival.

As opposed to this reporter who is having a meaningful impact on the world.

The implication is that unless your job is registered with the government for tax-taking purposes and unless it's a free-form act of self-expression -- certainly not about survival -- you are sorely oppressed. Poor Mexican workers don't just work, they toil, and they toil in the obscurity, not in factories but in workshops. The horror.

You might have an argument for beef, where the fat is distributed in the tissue, but I will speak about the industry that I am familiar with, which is the poultry industry.

Before there was industrial chicken there was hardly any chicken at all - you can't raise chickens on a large scale feeding them grass (they are not ruminants) or pecking at bugs. You can have a handful running around the barnyard but that's about it. That's why chicken was once a very special treat, not an everyday food. (In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye jokes that if a poor man eats a chicken then one of them is sick.)

"Organic" chickens get fed the same corn as any other chickens. "Pasture raised" chickens STILL get fed the same corn. Any chicken you buy is going to be corn fed - there's no other way to produce them on the scale needed to feed a large population. So you can pay a lot more money and still eat the same product like a hipster sucker. And the fat in chicken is not marbled in the meat but mostly in the skin and in distinct clumps that melt when the chicken is cooked, so if you eat boneless white meat (the most popular form) you are not getting much fat of any kind, good or bad. Chicken and eggs are both very high quality protein and also very inexpensive and you could do a lot worse than eating them, even in their "industrial" form.

Chicken and eggs are both very high quality protein and also very inexpensive and you could do a lot worse than eating them, even in their “industrial” form.

That is a mostly true statement. The one time fear of eating eggs due to cholesterol has been debunked. Also most fitness forums advise, that if you are on a budget, you can safely eat chicken breasts and eggs until you “cluck”.

It was these corn farmers who were fueling Mexico's high birth rates. Having them move off their farms ultimately will lead to a less crowded and more prosperous Mexico and fewer illegal immigrants. Indeed, we have had roughly no net immigration from Mexico this decade.

Actually, illegal alien females have more children than if they had stayed in Mexico. ~25% more than had they stayed in Mexico. Roughly 3 anchor babies / woman.

When I think of my biggest problems with what the NY Times prints, that is not #1 on my list.

It’s annoying in the way that SJWs’ fashion quirks are annoying.

In college, I had a class with a fat, loud, aggressively-shrill SJW who had a quasi Princess Leia-type haircut. She smelled like Old Spice. Her bizarre appearance and weird odor made the bullshit emanating from her mouth seem like just another manifestation of her nuttiness.

Compared to allowing Mexican corn farmers to gradually invest in modern methods and increase their yields. Many farmers would still have been pushed out of the industry, but at least not all at once, and the Mexican economy would have had a chance at absorbing them.

Instead, we put them in sudden competition with American industrial agriculture, with results that were not only predictable, but predicted.

Compared to allowing Mexican corn farmers to gradually invest in modern methods and increase their yields. Many farmers would still have been pushed out of the industry, but at least not all at once, and the Mexican economy would have had a chance at absorbing them.

Instead, we put them in sudden competition with American industrial agriculture, with results that were not only predictable, but predicted.

Basically, they were so obsolete at corn farming they were obliterated at the first competition.

Preserving a cultural/economy that archaic, or incrementally modernizing, would effectively be creating sort of a bunch of mexican amish, anachronisms.

I think most mexican peons would rather join the modern world rather than remaining as part of a living archaic cultural anthropology exhibit.

By the same logic, the West Virginia coal miner is obsolete due to strip-mining technology and cheap natural gas. The 3.5 million truckers in the US will soon be obsolete when the trucks drive themselves.

I think most of these American peons would prefer to keep their jobs, even though this means greater expense for the rest of us.

Right. So whatever it is you do, suppose you've been doing it for decades, and you have your own business, and by all accounts you've been doing everything right and working hard and making sacrifices to support your family. And then along comes some vastly superior competition who puts you out of business, and you need to get rid of your business and leave everyone you know and move to some place you've never heard of so you can do manual labor on someone else's farm. And you'd be grateful. Thank you, dear competitor! Before, when I had my farm and my family and my community and stability, I was obsolete - the very worst thing you can be! Praise NAFTA, holy NAFTA, you have shown me the error of my obsolete ways!

So, in return for $2.6 billion in corn sales, plus other crops, NAFTA put 1.9 million Mexican peons out of work, many of whom illegally migrated to the U.S., where taxpayers are paying for their children’s education, their medical care, and their imprisonment and food stamps.

What kind of deal is that?

As always, compared to what?

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?

Their lifestyle was over one way or another.

Who cares as opposed to what? Peons in Mexico planting corn with sticks are the problem of Mexico and Mexicans. The only thing bothering me is they’ve come here to invade and destroy Americans’ lifestyle.

So perhaps my answer is: “As opposed to them staying peons on Mexico planting corn with a stick and not hoovering up resources from Americans in the ways Steve enumerated.”

This hippy dippy unspoken assumption that all mankind are best good pals in it together must stop. No one on the planet is playing that game except white people, and those others are all laughing into their sleeves at the hilarity of our compassionate suicide.

Compared to allowing Mexican corn farmers to gradually invest in modern methods and increase their yields. Many farmers would still have been pushed out of the industry, but at least not all at once, and the Mexican economy would have had a chance at absorbing them.

Instead, we put them in sudden competition with American industrial agriculture, with results that were not only predictable, but predicted.

Basically, they were so obsolete at corn farming they were obliterated at the first competition.

Preserving a cultural/economy that archaic, or incrementally modernizing, would effectively be creating sort of a bunch of mexican amish, anachronisms.

I think most mexican peons would rather join the modern world rather than remaining as part of a living archaic cultural anthropology exhibit.

By the same logic, the West Virginia coal miner is obsolete due to strip-mining technology and cheap natural gas. The 3.5 million truckers in the US will soon be obsolete when the trucks drive themselves.

I think most of these American peons would prefer to keep their jobs, even though this means greater expense for the rest of us.

[It is a myth that] NAFTA will reduce illegal immigration. As manufacturing in northern Mexico expands, hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers will be drawn north. They will quickly find that wages in the Mexican maquiladora plants cannot compete with wages anywhere in the US. Out of economic necessity, many of these mobile workers will consider illegally immigrating into the US. In short, NAFTA has the potential to increase illegal immigration, not decrease it.

Today, foreign professional workers can enter the US labor market, but only “temporarily” & only if an employer gets a certification that a qualified US worker cannot be found. Also, the existing US immigration laws place a numerical limit on the number of temporary workers. Put another way, American workers have priority for American jobs.
NAFA radically alters this entire concept. Under NAFTA, Mexican and Canadian workers in 63 designated categories may be hired in the US, even if qualified American workers are available.
Under NAFTA, Mexican and Canadian entrepreneurs will be able to provide US drug stores with pharmacists, hotels with managers, and so on. As a result, hundreds of thousands of professional American workers are going to be put under intense pressure to cut their wages and benefits. [Lower-skilled workers] are going to lose their jobs to low-paid foreign contract workers. While no one was watching, US NAFTA negotiators radically revised the nation’s immigration laws.

This is not a new issue. Perot told us what would happen 25 years ago – and America ignored him. Today, we are living with the consequences of ignoring Perot and electing free markeeters to run trade policy.

We’re also living with the consequences of the “War on Terror” ($5 trillion spent, 1 million troops injured, 5,000 dead).

We’re living with the consequences of letting Big Pharma flood painkillers into the country (the hundreds of thousands of “White deaths” and millions of addicts) .

We’re living with the consequences of financial deregulation in 1999 (lifting of Glass-Steagal).

We’re living with the consequences of lots of things that happened back in the 90s.

I call complete BS on "1 million troops injured" . Whoever did this counted up the total # of visits for medical care, included people with colds, who slip in the shower, etc. There have been something like 40,000 Purple Hearts given out in Afghanistan and Iraq - that's closer to the true # of wounded (most from IEDs).

So, in return for $2.6 billion in corn sales, plus other crops, NAFTA put 1.9 million Mexican peons out of work, many of whom illegally migrated to the U.S., where taxpayers are paying for their children’s education, their medical care, and their imprisonment and food stamps.

What kind of deal is that?

As always, compared to what?

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?

Their lifestyle was over one way or another.

Who cares as opposed to what? Peons in Mexico planting corn with sticks are the problem of Mexico and Mexicans. The only thing bothering me is they’ve come here to invade and destroy Americans’ lifestyle.

So perhaps my answer is: “As opposed to them staying peons on Mexico planting corn with a stick and not hoovering up resources from Americans in the ways Steve enumerated.”

This hippy dippy unspoken assumption that all mankind are best good pals in it together must stop. No one on the planet is playing that game except white people, and those others are all laughing into their sleeves at the hilarity of our compassionate suicide.

Post NAFTA, a huge issue in the poultry and pork industry is the contract CAFO phenomena where the producer is completely under the thumb of the major processors. The contract poultry and pork producer is reduced to near debt slavery. This has encouraged the use of illegal labor to meet extremely tight margins.

Tell me that is not so.

No, true enough. Similar model to uber -poultry processors call their farmers “independent contractors” so they can avoid the labor laws.

But this has nothing to do with the product itself, which is fine if maybe a little on the tasteless side.

Should U.S, farmers fail to predict an entirely predictable increase in South American corn production, and global prices dropped due to a glut in supply to the point where it would be left to rot in the fields (I can't imagine such a price point, as corn is very storable, and doesn't use immigrant labor to harvest), it would only be a season before the fields were repurposed for something more lucrative. (Not even taking into account price under-cutting strategies).

Cloud, thank you. you are so right. Corn is storable and around here sometimes it doesn’t get cut until spring. There is really no need for migrant labor in corn agriculture. Plant and harvest all by machine. However, the Amish around here sometimes pick field corn by hand and stack the stalks the old time way.

Obviously you provided more detail than I could in an already long article. The issues with industrial poultry involve largely antibiotics used by CAFOs. Estrogen is also less of an issue with pork. The FDA claims that both chicken and pork feed is free of estrogens in the US. They would not lie would they???

But both industrial pork and poultry may be contaminated with xenoestrogens or endocrine disrupting chemicals which are only beginning to become regulated.

The major endocrine disruptor BPA is still ubiquitous in the US. It is still widely use in industrial canning, packaging and in thermal printing paper (ie: receipt paper) which contaminates almost everything including paper money. The canning industry is making moves towards BPA free cans but is has been delayed numerous times.

If the Trump administration is smart it would accelerate the move away from the use of BPA in food processing and printing industries. No Trump supporter wants to be a "Low-T" male or married to one. Trump could eliminate much of the use of BPA overnight and win over lots of concerned soccer moms and environmentalists.

An agricultural policy encouraging the move away from CAFOs would be a huge voter winner in fly over America.

The stuff you are talking about is just not in chicken unless maybe it’s canned chicken breast in a tuna fish can (not a big seller). A whole chicken you buy in the supermarket is “minimally processed” – it’s as close to what you would get if you raised your own as any product you can buy in the supermarket. Ditto eggs – what comes out of the bird is what you get. They wash it off, put in a box and that’s it. There are all sorts of processed products out there – nuggets and such but if you buy a whole chicken then it’s been gutted and plucked and that’s it.

"A whole chicken you buy in the supermarket is “minimally processed” – it’s as close to what you would get if you raised your own as any product you can buy in the supermarket. Ditto eggs – what comes out of the bird is what you get. They wash it off, put in a box and that’s it."

You're just talking about the end stage "processing" of corporate poultry products. It's obvious you've never spent much time on either a yeoman farm or on site at any stage of corporate meat production, slaughter, processing, packing, storage and distribution.

I'm no PETA person on some hippie farm in Oregon and 95% of my diet is "corporate", but I still know that there are significant discernible differences in food qualities in many food product categories.

Yes Charles! Excellent call. Also, as a tot my parents loved Reagan and during the reign of his successors they pines for him.

I didn't unseestand such things so I took their word for it.

For the past decade however I thought about things a bit and learned a bit more and came to notice that behind that cheery demeanor and possibly good intent was the Destroyer of my country. None of that politically correct bullshit had any power until Reagan let them have it in exchange for his economics that, for the first time since the Hoovervilles, gave every favor to the rich and every expectorant to the poor.

Between 1930 and 1985 the rising tide was lifting all ships and the median White person was getting a better and better life.

Reagan turnes the ship over and it has been sinking ever since.

I have never reaceived anything but calumny from Lifer Republicans for sharing this. But maybe this is an idea whose time has come.

Reagan seems like a great guy to go wild on the town with but if anyone else had been president at that time - including the deranged melaised man - America would not be on its way into oblivion at this point.

At the risk of being diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (in the professional opinion of every seventh commenter, it seems every fifth commenter suffers the malady…): I am genuinely striving to make sense of your metaphor of the expectorant.

The context suggests the expectorant represents something harmful or malign, but expectorant does not merely induce coughing; it does so for medicinal and beneficial purposes (clearing excess mucous, etc.) and so is more akin to the incision of a lifesaving surgeon than the wound of a murderer. So Reagan’s policies were inconvenient or painful to the poor but ultimately helped them…or…something?

How about “…every favour to the rich and every demand of the poor,” as a substitute? (A demand is close to the opposite of a favour, so we’ve some parallel construction, too.)

It’s just occurred to me, perhaps you meant “every expectation of the poor,” with the idea being Reagan expected the poor to suffer the pitfalls of his policies.

In the event, I’ve mixed feelings about Reagan. The amnesty chaps my hide, but I was too young to recall any potential betrayals by the Congress to enforce the law thereafter, and I’ve never investigated the record. Any amnesty is always an invitation to future bad behaviour; anyone who’s ever cared for children knows it. If the rules are not enforced always and to the letter, firmly but fairly, as we say, they become contemptible and they are disregarded. This truth is why I’ve no truck with the horseshit about a “path to citizenship” and all the rest of it that now even Trump is emanating, speaking of treachery….

This graph of Mexican corn imports from 1960 to 2016 show steady growth, probably tracking population, until a collapse in 1990 and then a surge back to the previous pattern after 1994, the year NAFTA passed. So is this corn card stuff Mexicans being nostalgic for their tough guy past? It appears to me that Mexico engineered a collapse in corn imports in 1990 for whatever reason. So the Mexican ‘deep government’ might be thinking: Let’s play the corn card again.

Are US corn exports to Mexico really advantaged? I would think Mexico buys the cheapest corn they can. So their threat of a sustained embargo is probably not real. And if US corn is subsidized, just give the farms money not to grow corn, like fed gov used to.

Chicken and eggs are both very high quality protein and also very inexpensive and you could do a lot worse than eating them, even in their “industrial” form.

That is a mostly true statement. The one time fear of eating eggs due to cholesterol has been debunked. Also most fitness forums advise, that if you are on a budget, you can safely eat chicken breasts and eggs until you "cluck".

I agree, but to be safe I would suggest limiting eggs to an average of 2 or 3 /day or just 1 if you already have high cholesterol. That’s not a big hardship.

The stuff you are talking about is just not in chicken unless maybe it's canned chicken breast in a tuna fish can (not a big seller). A whole chicken you buy in the supermarket is "minimally processed" - it's as close to what you would get if you raised your own as any product you can buy in the supermarket. Ditto eggs - what comes out of the bird is what you get. They wash it off, put in a box and that's it. There are all sorts of processed products out there - nuggets and such but if you buy a whole chicken then it's been gutted and plucked and that's it.

“A whole chicken you buy in the supermarket is “minimally processed” – it’s as close to what you would get if you raised your own as any product you can buy in the supermarket. Ditto eggs – what comes out of the bird is what you get. They wash it off, put in a box and that’s it.”

You’re just talking about the end stage “processing” of corporate poultry products. It’s obvious you’ve never spent much time on either a yeoman farm or on site at any stage of corporate meat production, slaughter, processing, packing, storage and distribution.

I’m no PETA person on some hippie farm in Oregon and 95% of my diet is “corporate”, but I still know that there are significant discernible differences in food qualities in many food product categories.

Sorry, wrong, I grew up on an egg farm. As I said before, a "yeoman poultry farm" is a contradiction in terms. The only way you can raise poultry so that it is widely available to all is on at least a semi-industrial scale. The farm that I grew up on was comparable to modern "cage free" operations , though in between then and now the industry went over mostly to cages (what's old is new again).

You can't sell chicken for 99 cents/ lb. (cheaper than what you pay in the supermarket for the corn meal that they are fed) without losing something and that something is taste. Corporate chicken (esp. white meat) is very high quality protein but it's not exactly jam packed with flavor. "Artisanal" chicken that costs $6/lb. tastes a little better but it doesn't taste 6x better and most people who are not childless hipster software developers couldn't afford to eat it regularly.

Perot discussed these issues back in the early 90s. He claimed NAFTA would trigger high levels of Mexican migration north into the U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhwhMXOxHTg

Perot:

[It is a myth that] NAFTA will reduce illegal immigration. As manufacturing in northern Mexico expands, hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers will be drawn north. They will quickly find that wages in the Mexican maquiladora plants cannot compete with wages anywhere in the US. Out of economic necessity, many of these mobile workers will consider illegally immigrating into the US. In short, NAFTA has the potential to increase illegal immigration, not decrease it.

Today, foreign professional workers can enter the US labor market, but only “temporarily” & only if an employer gets a certification that a qualified US worker cannot be found. Also, the existing US immigration laws place a numerical limit on the number of temporary workers. Put another way, American workers have priority for American jobs.
NAFA radically alters this entire concept. Under NAFTA, Mexican and Canadian workers in 63 designated categories may be hired in the US, even if qualified American workers are available.
Under NAFTA, Mexican and Canadian entrepreneurs will be able to provide US drug stores with pharmacists, hotels with managers, and so on. As a result, hundreds of thousands of professional American workers are going to be put under intense pressure to cut their wages and benefits. [Lower-skilled workers] are going to lose their jobs to low-paid foreign contract workers. While no one was watching, US NAFTA negotiators radically revised the nation’s immigration laws.

This is not a new issue. Perot told us what would happen 25 years ago - and America ignored him. Today, we are living with the consequences of ignoring Perot and electing free markeeters to run trade policy.

We're also living with the consequences of the "War on Terror" ($5 trillion spent, 1 million troops injured, 5,000 dead).

We're living with the consequences of letting Big Pharma flood painkillers into the country (the hundreds of thousands of "White deaths" and millions of addicts) .

We're living with the consequences of financial deregulation in 1999 (lifting of Glass-Steagal).

We're living with the consequences of lots of things that happened back in the 90s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyCBfeDSnQQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM_PthsFFEw

I call complete BS on “1 million troops injured” . Whoever did this counted up the total # of visits for medical care, included people with colds, who slip in the shower, etc. There have been something like 40,000 Purple Hearts given out in Afghanistan and Iraq – that’s closer to the true # of wounded (most from IEDs).

The United States has likely reached a grim but historic milestone in the war on terror: 1 million veterans injured from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan...
All that can be said with any certainty is that as of last December more than 900,000 service men and women had been treated at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics since returning from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the monthly rate of new patients to these facilities as of the end of 2012 was around 10,000. Beyond that, the picture gets murky. In March, VA abruptly stopped releasing statistics on non-fatal war casualties to the public.

According to the Pentagon, more than half to two-thirds of Americans killed or wounded in combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been victims of IED explosions.

Half a million US soldiers have suffered brain damage in Iraq.

http://www.parapundit.com/archives/008624.html

A team of investigators have shown evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in brain tissue from blast-exposed military service personnel.
Laboratory experiments conducted at Boston University, New York Medical College (NYMC) and the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System demonstrated that exposure to a single blast equivalent to a typical improvised explosive device (IED) results in CTE and long-term brain impairments that accompany the disease. They also found that the blast wind, not the shock wave, from the IED blast leads to traumatic brain injury (TBI) and long-term consequences, including CTE.

This research, which represents the first case series of postmortem brains from U.S. military personnel who were exposed to a blast and/or a concussive injury, will be published online May 16 by Science Translational Medicine.

The number of US soldiers exposed to IED blasts: about 460,000. That's a lot of brain damage. Clearly, these wars did far more harm to America than they were worth. We will pay for their costs for decades to come and those costs will come in many forms. How about soldiers made violent (toward family or strangers) by brain damage? Or soldiers driven to drink or drugs? Or soldiers unable to hold jobs? These wars did great damage to the American nation.

CTE, which can only be diagnosed postmortem, is a progressive neurodegenerative brain disorder that has been reported in athletes with multiple concussions or subconcussive injuries. In early stages, CTE is characterized by the presence of abnormal deposits of a protein called tau in the form of neurofibrillary tangles, glial tangles and neuropil threads throughout the brain. These tau lesions eventually lead to brain cell death. CTE has clinical features in common with TBI, including psychiatric symptoms and long-term cognitive disability involving memory and learning deficits. TBI can impact military personnel exposed to an explosive blast and may affect approximately 20 percent of the 2.3 million servicemen and women deployed since 2001.

These figures were compiled years ago. So undoubtedly the numbers are much higher now.

Over 1 million soldiers injured in the "War on Terror" (Afghanistan, Iraq).
Over 500,000 soldiers have suffered brain damage from the "War on Terror."

That is the toll of the last decade and half.

Saudi terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11. In response, we invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and a lot of other countries (with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia). Now huge numbers of soldiers are injured and mentally damaged for life.

Then people ask why so many whites are getting addicted to drugs and painkillers, or committing suicide. It's obvious that the these soldier injuries and mental damage often require painkillers to deal with, which is what is fueling much of the opioid epidemic. It's also obvious that many injured or mentally damaged individuals get depressed and kill themselves. I bet a lot of these soldiers end up getting their friends and relatives addicted too.

"War on Terror" = White Death

By the way, the entire phrase "War on Terror" is a totally Orweillian phrase. How exactly does one fight a "war on terror"? How does one win such a war? Why are we fighting this "war on terror" against innocent countries that never attacked us on 9/11 (Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria)? Why doesn't the "War on Terror" target the country that supplied that terrorists and funded them (Saudi Arabia)? Why has this war lasted over 15 years but WWII only lasted 6 years?

Most posters here want to complain about the White Death, but they have nothing to say about the factors that have produced this rise in mortality.

-Nothing to say about the "War on Terror"
-Nothing to say about Big Pharma
-Nothing to say on pill mills
-Nothing to say on lack of healthcare and drug treatment
-Nothing to say about our punitive approach and the War on Drugs
-Nothing to say about how "Socialist" Europeans somehow have evaded this White Death
-Nothing to say about how opium production skyrocketed after the Taliban were destroyed

"A whole chicken you buy in the supermarket is “minimally processed” – it’s as close to what you would get if you raised your own as any product you can buy in the supermarket. Ditto eggs – what comes out of the bird is what you get. They wash it off, put in a box and that’s it."

You're just talking about the end stage "processing" of corporate poultry products. It's obvious you've never spent much time on either a yeoman farm or on site at any stage of corporate meat production, slaughter, processing, packing, storage and distribution.

I'm no PETA person on some hippie farm in Oregon and 95% of my diet is "corporate", but I still know that there are significant discernible differences in food qualities in many food product categories.

Sorry, wrong, I grew up on an egg farm. As I said before, a “yeoman poultry farm” is a contradiction in terms. The only way you can raise poultry so that it is widely available to all is on at least a semi-industrial scale. The farm that I grew up on was comparable to modern “cage free” operations , though in between then and now the industry went over mostly to cages (what’s old is new again).

You can’t sell chicken for 99 cents/ lb. (cheaper than what you pay in the supermarket for the corn meal that they are fed) without losing something and that something is taste. Corporate chicken (esp. white meat) is very high quality protein but it’s not exactly jam packed with flavor. “Artisanal” chicken that costs $6/lb. tastes a little better but it doesn’t taste 6x better and most people who are not childless hipster software developers couldn’t afford to eat it regularly.

I hate chicken . I never eat it here in America for various reasons . However when I was in East Timor for a few months I ended up eating chicken because the gracious people that I met there insisted on cooking big meals with chicken as the centerpiece and beef is very scarce there . They all had a couple of dozen chickens running around their properties and the chickens ate mostly the greens growing in their gardens. A lot of lemon grass , galanga , ginger , some water spinach ,kankung . Basically the chickens were seasoning themselves for us :). They also gave the chickens and dogs the table scraps left over from all their meals , just emptied their plates on the front terrace and they all came running . They call these chickens : ayam kampung _ village chickens.

The reality is that most people prefer the industrial food because of its blander flavor profile, like the more refined grains like white bread and grain fed, corporate poultry, eggs, beef, and dairy. Grain fed beef is better marbled, and has less of a gamey taste and texture than grass fed beef. Grass fed milk has a grassy taste and lingering aftertaste than many people don't like compared to the "cleaner" taste of regular, grain fed milk.

Corporate chicken (esp. white meat) is very high quality protein but it’s not exactly jam packed with flavor. “Artisanal” chicken that costs $6/lb. tastes a little better but it doesn’t taste 6x better and most people who are not childless hipster software developers couldn’t afford to eat it regularly.

Tastes a little better? Dude, I had a DOG that wouldn't eat Purdue chicken. Turned his nose up at it. But he'd chow down on the free range stuff. Purdue chicken is nasty. Tyson is even worse.

The thing is, we eat way too much meat as it is, environmentally. Industrial animal farming is grotesque. It's shameful and disgusting. Why do we need 99 cent a pound chicken? For what? Instead of eating three pieces of chicken and one potato, eat three potatoes and one piece of chicken.

Though of course, immigration has a great deal to do with all these food issues. The U.S. population should be about 150 million. Still a lot of people, but a whole lot less than it is now.

I call complete BS on "1 million troops injured" . Whoever did this counted up the total # of visits for medical care, included people with colds, who slip in the shower, etc. There have been something like 40,000 Purple Hearts given out in Afghanistan and Iraq - that's closer to the true # of wounded (most from IEDs).

The United States has likely reached a grim but historic milestone in the war on terror: 1 million veterans injured from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan…
All that can be said with any certainty is that as of last December more than 900,000 service men and women had been treated at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics since returning from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the monthly rate of new patients to these facilities as of the end of 2012 was around 10,000. Beyond that, the picture gets murky. In March, VA abruptly stopped releasing statistics on non-fatal war casualties to the public.

According to the Pentagon, more than half to two-thirds of Americans killed or wounded in combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been victims of IED explosions.

A team of investigators have shown evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in brain tissue from blast-exposed military service personnel.
Laboratory experiments conducted at Boston University, New York Medical College (NYMC) and the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System demonstrated that exposure to a single blast equivalent to a typical improvised explosive device (IED) results in CTE and long-term brain impairments that accompany the disease. They also found that the blast wind, not the shock wave, from the IED blast leads to traumatic brain injury (TBI) and long-term consequences, including CTE.

This research, which represents the first case series of postmortem brains from U.S. military personnel who were exposed to a blast and/or a concussive injury, will be published online May 16 by Science Translational Medicine.

The number of US soldiers exposed to IED blasts: about 460,000. That’s a lot of brain damage. Clearly, these wars did far more harm to America than they were worth. We will pay for their costs for decades to come and those costs will come in many forms. How about soldiers made violent (toward family or strangers) by brain damage? Or soldiers driven to drink or drugs? Or soldiers unable to hold jobs? These wars did great damage to the American nation.

CTE, which can only be diagnosed postmortem, is a progressive neurodegenerative brain disorder that has been reported in athletes with multiple concussions or subconcussive injuries. In early stages, CTE is characterized by the presence of abnormal deposits of a protein called tau in the form of neurofibrillary tangles, glial tangles and neuropil threads throughout the brain. These tau lesions eventually lead to brain cell death. CTE has clinical features in common with TBI, including psychiatric symptoms and long-term cognitive disability involving memory and learning deficits. TBI can impact military personnel exposed to an explosive blast and may affect approximately 20 percent of the 2.3 million servicemen and women deployed since 2001.

These figures were compiled years ago. So undoubtedly the numbers are much higher now.

Over 1 million soldiers injured in the “War on Terror” (Afghanistan, Iraq).
Over 500,000 soldiers have suffered brain damage from the “War on Terror.”

That is the toll of the last decade and half.

Saudi terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11. In response, we invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and a lot of other countries (with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia). Now huge numbers of soldiers are injured and mentally damaged for life.

Then people ask why so many whites are getting addicted to drugs and painkillers, or committing suicide. It’s obvious that the these soldier injuries and mental damage often require painkillers to deal with, which is what is fueling much of the opioid epidemic. It’s also obvious that many injured or mentally damaged individuals get depressed and kill themselves. I bet a lot of these soldiers end up getting their friends and relatives addicted too.

“War on Terror” = White Death

By the way, the entire phrase “War on Terror” is a totally Orweillian phrase. How exactly does one fight a “war on terror”? How does one win such a war? Why are we fighting this “war on terror” against innocent countries that never attacked us on 9/11 (Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria)? Why doesn’t the “War on Terror” target the country that supplied that terrorists and funded them (Saudi Arabia)? Why has this war lasted over 15 years but WWII only lasted 6 years?

Most posters here want to complain about the White Death, but they have nothing to say about the factors that have produced this rise in mortality.

-Nothing to say about the “War on Terror”
-Nothing to say about Big Pharma
-Nothing to say on pill mills
-Nothing to say on lack of healthcare and drug treatment
-Nothing to say about our punitive approach and the War on Drugs
-Nothing to say about how “Socialist” Europeans somehow have evaded this White Death
-Nothing to say about how opium production skyrocketed after the Taliban were destroyed

The actual # injured by IED was 31,000. Most of the rest were "injured" but didn't even know it (maybe until it is time to claim disability). Now 31,000 is bad enough (in the past many of these would have died, now they just have to live with horrific injuries for the rest of their life) but making up phony #s in the millions is not helpful.

I do CTE research and have contributed to studies in the field. I saw the original results of IEDs (and experienced them directly) as an FMF and FMFQO. My doctoral research is in a specific area of TBI, PCS and PPCS and my MD specialty is in neurosurgery. I deal in combat casualty care, so I have some experience with brain damage, and what you say about it is broadly correct, with the acknowledgement that our wars are politicized, with one side wanting to exaggerate the harm they have caused while the other side wants to minimize it. Suffice it to say that it's wiser to err on the side of the larger numbers of individuals suffering from undiagnosed brain damage, often in very subtle ways. "He's just not the same person I knew since he came back from [Iraq, AFG, Viet Nam, Korea, the Pacific, Europe, ...]," is an old lament, and one that we now are learning is the result of physical injury to the brain, and not just due to emotional stress.We've come a long way from the days when John Hersey, writing Into the Valley, about a Marine unit on Guadalcanal, could marvel at men who seemed uninjured and physically sound, who suddenly collapsed and died in the aftermath of mortar and artillery shelling, while corpsmen were helpless to save them.

Sorry, wrong, I grew up on an egg farm. As I said before, a "yeoman poultry farm" is a contradiction in terms. The only way you can raise poultry so that it is widely available to all is on at least a semi-industrial scale. The farm that I grew up on was comparable to modern "cage free" operations , though in between then and now the industry went over mostly to cages (what's old is new again).

You can't sell chicken for 99 cents/ lb. (cheaper than what you pay in the supermarket for the corn meal that they are fed) without losing something and that something is taste. Corporate chicken (esp. white meat) is very high quality protein but it's not exactly jam packed with flavor. "Artisanal" chicken that costs $6/lb. tastes a little better but it doesn't taste 6x better and most people who are not childless hipster software developers couldn't afford to eat it regularly.

I hate chicken . I never eat it here in America for various reasons . However when I was in East Timor for a few months I ended up eating chicken because the gracious people that I met there insisted on cooking big meals with chicken as the centerpiece and beef is very scarce there . They all had a couple of dozen chickens running around their properties and the chickens ate mostly the greens growing in their gardens. A lot of lemon grass , galanga , ginger , some water spinach ,kankung . Basically the chickens were seasoning themselves for us :). They also gave the chickens and dogs the table scraps left over from all their meals , just emptied their plates on the front terrace and they all came running . They call these chickens : ayam kampung _ village chickens.

Yes, that's how chicken once was in America maybe 100 years ago (minus the tropical herbs). But figure it out - if they have a flock of 2 dozen chickens then they are not eating chicken every day or in a few weeks they wouldn't have any. And that's just to feed their own family and guests and not millions of people living off the farm. You can have cheap plentiful food or tasty hand raised food but not both.

Sorry, wrong, I grew up on an egg farm. As I said before, a "yeoman poultry farm" is a contradiction in terms. The only way you can raise poultry so that it is widely available to all is on at least a semi-industrial scale. The farm that I grew up on was comparable to modern "cage free" operations , though in between then and now the industry went over mostly to cages (what's old is new again).

You can't sell chicken for 99 cents/ lb. (cheaper than what you pay in the supermarket for the corn meal that they are fed) without losing something and that something is taste. Corporate chicken (esp. white meat) is very high quality protein but it's not exactly jam packed with flavor. "Artisanal" chicken that costs $6/lb. tastes a little better but it doesn't taste 6x better and most people who are not childless hipster software developers couldn't afford to eat it regularly.

The reality is that most people prefer the industrial food because of its blander flavor profile, like the more refined grains like white bread and grain fed, corporate poultry, eggs, beef, and dairy. Grain fed beef is better marbled, and has less of a gamey taste and texture than grass fed beef. Grass fed milk has a grassy taste and lingering aftertaste than many people don’t like compared to the “cleaner” taste of regular, grain fed milk.

Grain fed beef is better marbled, and has less of a gamey taste and texture than grass fed beef. Grass fed milk has a grassy taste and lingering aftertaste than many people don’t like compared to the “cleaner” taste of regular, grain fed milk.

I don't know what they feed European cattle, but a colleague from France said American beef was the best he had ever had.

The corrupt globalizer Ronald Reagan and the Bush Organized Crime Family were the ones that cooked up the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA). The globalizer baby boomers Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich rammed NAFTA through the US Congress.

Don't lump the great Ronald Reagan in with that Bush crowd, Mr. Pewitt! He was not of their ilk, nor a globalist like the Clintons and Bushes. Either you are a young fellow with no memory of the goings on in the 80's, or you are just full of it.

Let me turn Travis's reply around - maybe not "Amnesty was done with the help of the Senate", but "Amnesty was done by the Senate and House with the help of President Reagan's signature". This was 3 decades ago, but I was around, OK Charles? The deal was, that we would implement real border control, but to keep things more civil and compassionate ("compassionate" was more Bush's bit though), the alleged 3 million Mexicans would be amnestied as a 1-time thing, and people figured that number could be assimilated eventually. Reagan upheld his part of the deal, but the US Congress/Senate did not keep the word of their "leaders" in creating a real border control system.

Now, Reagan was a great patriotic American, unlike the scum you lump him in with - I was there, Charles. One of his faults was that he trusted the Americans in the US Congress more than he trusted the Soviet Russians. (Remember "trust, but verify", which actually means "don't trust"?) Reagan should have looked at the US Congresscritters with same wariness as he did the Evil Empire. He was too trusting of his fellow Americans in the Feral Government.

Reagan was the treasonous rat who killed the Republican Party in California. . Balderdash! He was the type that the establishment non-conservative Republicans wanted to keep out. Reagan was governor of California during the turbulent times of the '60's - the radicals couldn't stand him, but he stood up for real Californians then, just as he stood up for real Americans in the 80's. You should know that the Republican establishment on a national level wanted nothing to do with him, and got the (somewhat) goofball Jerry Ford the nomination in 1976 over Ronnie. Ronnie gave it a good shot in '76, but the establishment R's did not want him. He was like the Barry Goldwater of the 70's and '80's.

He did make mistakes due to his trust of his countrymen in power. Amnesty was one big one and the budget deficits were the other big one. In the latter case, the promise from Congress was that domestic spending would be curtailed to allow for the build-up in defense spending which would (and DID) end the Cold War. (There was a lot more to ending the Cold War than that, of course, but forcing the USSR into close to bankruptcy to keep up with "Star Wars" and the rest of the build-up was a big part of it.)

As to your last 2 paragraphs:

Mass immigration was designed to destroy European Christian nation-states. Trade deal scams were designed to destroy national sovereignty and pauperize Whites Without College Degrees(WWCDs).

The United States, France, Germany, England, Sweden and the Netherlands are all headed for civil war; mass immigration will be the cause of those wars.

I agree with you wholeheartedly.

Read some more history of the 1980's, Charles, if you don't know this stuff.

I wouldn't call him "Saint Ronnie", but Ronald Reagan was a great American. I would have no problem with the Catholic Church making him a Saint; there are apparently a lot of saints though, and they'd have to bump someone from the calendar. That'd be fine with me, but with that Commie Pope they've got up there now, I'll just be glad if they don't come up with St. Fidel's day, 5th Monday in February. To celebrate, we'll all drive in old junked-out 57 Chevys to the doctor for national free health care for check-ups for scurvy due to lack of fresh produce from the Peoples' Orchards.

Not really, Ronnie Reagan sided with the growers over Cesar Chavez which means he supported a lot of illegal immigrant farm workers. In fact by 1980 alone about 1.5 illegal immigrants already lived in California long before NAFTA. Prop 187 also occurred before NAFTA so the New York Times has an excused since not only 1.5 people left Mexico but it is more like 8 million. Not all the 8 million were displaced by NAFTA. Gerald Ford was a good guy in my book, he was not a right winger but Right wingers helped illegal immigration like Reagan by supporting the growers. Ford’s problem was bringing in too many Vietnamese.

Cynthia, I don't deny he supported some of the Conservative causes that were eventually detrimental, say supporting the growers. He did not intend to inundate the country with non-Americans, though, like all of his presidential successors let happen. The whole reason the amnesty happened was that Reagan wanted to get the borders under control (there were still a decent amount of patriotic republicans - and even Dems. in the Feral Gov't back then). The Congress just reneged on their part of the bargain, and we all got screwed.

Would Ford not have supported big business too, were he in office long enough? I think we was just the usual establishment Republican. That's why they wanted him to run against Mr. Jimmy, win or lose, just like a Dole, McCain, and a Romney. They wanted to keep the real mavericks, meaning the guys that cared about real Americans, way the hell away from power. People on zerohedge think that Reagan's being shot was a warning from the deep state - "get with the program - that was just a .22!" (It was really a near-thing that he didn't die from this bullet, though, as I've read.)

I hate chicken . I never eat it here in America for various reasons . However when I was in East Timor for a few months I ended up eating chicken because the gracious people that I met there insisted on cooking big meals with chicken as the centerpiece and beef is very scarce there . They all had a couple of dozen chickens running around their properties and the chickens ate mostly the greens growing in their gardens. A lot of lemon grass , galanga , ginger , some water spinach ,kankung . Basically the chickens were seasoning themselves for us :). They also gave the chickens and dogs the table scraps left over from all their meals , just emptied their plates on the front terrace and they all came running . They call these chickens : ayam kampung _ village chickens.

Anyway the chicken was the best tasting I had in my life .

Yes, that’s how chicken once was in America maybe 100 years ago (minus the tropical herbs). But figure it out – if they have a flock of 2 dozen chickens then they are not eating chicken every day or in a few weeks they wouldn’t have any. And that’s just to feed their own family and guests and not millions of people living off the farm. You can have cheap plentiful food or tasty hand raised food but not both.

Most of the flavor in the chicken we eat comes from the herbs, garlic, spices, and citrus juice that we add to it. For people on a tight budget, and with little time, the rotisserie chicken sold at a Sam's Club, for instance, is a Godsend.

The United States has likely reached a grim but historic milestone in the war on terror: 1 million veterans injured from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan...
All that can be said with any certainty is that as of last December more than 900,000 service men and women had been treated at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics since returning from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the monthly rate of new patients to these facilities as of the end of 2012 was around 10,000. Beyond that, the picture gets murky. In March, VA abruptly stopped releasing statistics on non-fatal war casualties to the public.

According to the Pentagon, more than half to two-thirds of Americans killed or wounded in combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been victims of IED explosions.

Half a million US soldiers have suffered brain damage in Iraq.

http://www.parapundit.com/archives/008624.html

A team of investigators have shown evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in brain tissue from blast-exposed military service personnel.
Laboratory experiments conducted at Boston University, New York Medical College (NYMC) and the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System demonstrated that exposure to a single blast equivalent to a typical improvised explosive device (IED) results in CTE and long-term brain impairments that accompany the disease. They also found that the blast wind, not the shock wave, from the IED blast leads to traumatic brain injury (TBI) and long-term consequences, including CTE.

This research, which represents the first case series of postmortem brains from U.S. military personnel who were exposed to a blast and/or a concussive injury, will be published online May 16 by Science Translational Medicine.

The number of US soldiers exposed to IED blasts: about 460,000. That's a lot of brain damage. Clearly, these wars did far more harm to America than they were worth. We will pay for their costs for decades to come and those costs will come in many forms. How about soldiers made violent (toward family or strangers) by brain damage? Or soldiers driven to drink or drugs? Or soldiers unable to hold jobs? These wars did great damage to the American nation.

CTE, which can only be diagnosed postmortem, is a progressive neurodegenerative brain disorder that has been reported in athletes with multiple concussions or subconcussive injuries. In early stages, CTE is characterized by the presence of abnormal deposits of a protein called tau in the form of neurofibrillary tangles, glial tangles and neuropil threads throughout the brain. These tau lesions eventually lead to brain cell death. CTE has clinical features in common with TBI, including psychiatric symptoms and long-term cognitive disability involving memory and learning deficits. TBI can impact military personnel exposed to an explosive blast and may affect approximately 20 percent of the 2.3 million servicemen and women deployed since 2001.

These figures were compiled years ago. So undoubtedly the numbers are much higher now.

Over 1 million soldiers injured in the "War on Terror" (Afghanistan, Iraq).
Over 500,000 soldiers have suffered brain damage from the "War on Terror."

That is the toll of the last decade and half.

Saudi terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11. In response, we invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and a lot of other countries (with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia). Now huge numbers of soldiers are injured and mentally damaged for life.

Then people ask why so many whites are getting addicted to drugs and painkillers, or committing suicide. It's obvious that the these soldier injuries and mental damage often require painkillers to deal with, which is what is fueling much of the opioid epidemic. It's also obvious that many injured or mentally damaged individuals get depressed and kill themselves. I bet a lot of these soldiers end up getting their friends and relatives addicted too.

"War on Terror" = White Death

By the way, the entire phrase "War on Terror" is a totally Orweillian phrase. How exactly does one fight a "war on terror"? How does one win such a war? Why are we fighting this "war on terror" against innocent countries that never attacked us on 9/11 (Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria)? Why doesn't the "War on Terror" target the country that supplied that terrorists and funded them (Saudi Arabia)? Why has this war lasted over 15 years but WWII only lasted 6 years?

Most posters here want to complain about the White Death, but they have nothing to say about the factors that have produced this rise in mortality.

-Nothing to say about the "War on Terror"
-Nothing to say about Big Pharma
-Nothing to say on pill mills
-Nothing to say on lack of healthcare and drug treatment
-Nothing to say about our punitive approach and the War on Drugs
-Nothing to say about how "Socialist" Europeans somehow have evaded this White Death
-Nothing to say about how opium production skyrocketed after the Taliban were destroyed

These are highly inflated #s, counting in the way that is most favorable to people with some agenda to inflate the #s.

The actual # injured by IED was 31,000. Most of the rest were “injured” but didn’t even know it (maybe until it is time to claim disability). Now 31,000 is bad enough (in the past many of these would have died, now they just have to live with horrific injuries for the rest of their life) but making up phony #s in the millions is not helpful.

These figures are from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Hardly a partisan, anti-war source. After releasing these figures, the DVA stopped releasing new numbers.

I agree there are people with agenda. It's just that they're working to suppress the numbers. The same way they concocted evidence of WMDs in Iraq (google "yellowcake") and Iraq's links to 9/11 (all the hijackers were from Saudi, Egypt, and UAE). The people with the agenda have been lying for years and continue to lie about the real costs of the war.

The Bush administration once claimed the Iraq War would cost only $50 billion and that it'd be paid for by oil revenue. The real long-term cost has been projected to $5 trillion, none of that paid for through oil. So roughly 100x the projected cost. The media have hardly discussed this, and neither have the political class. That's an agenda.

The IED injuries aren't always apparent. Not unless someone notices something and goes into the doctor to complain. The reality is that over 500,000 have experienced mental trauma from IED explosions. Only a small percentage may have reported symptoms, but that's likely because a lot of troops haven't noticed yet. It often takes years for full blown problems to manifest themselves.

Besides Esperanto, the language of pitchforks is the only one these Two-Percenters will understand.

“There are means by which we can control our border better than we have.

And there should be penalties for breaking the law,” Jeb Bush added.

“But the way I look at this — and I’m going to say this, and it’ll be on tape and so be it.

The way I look at this is someone who comes to our country because they couldn’t come legally, they come to our country because their families — the dad who loved their children — was worried that their children didn’t have food on the table.

And they wanted to make sure their family was intact, and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family.

Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love.

It’s an act of commitment to your family.

I honestly think that that is a different kind of crime that there should be a price paid, but it shouldn’t rile people up that people are actually coming to this country to provide for their families.”

Sorry, wrong, I grew up on an egg farm. As I said before, a "yeoman poultry farm" is a contradiction in terms. The only way you can raise poultry so that it is widely available to all is on at least a semi-industrial scale. The farm that I grew up on was comparable to modern "cage free" operations , though in between then and now the industry went over mostly to cages (what's old is new again).

You can't sell chicken for 99 cents/ lb. (cheaper than what you pay in the supermarket for the corn meal that they are fed) without losing something and that something is taste. Corporate chicken (esp. white meat) is very high quality protein but it's not exactly jam packed with flavor. "Artisanal" chicken that costs $6/lb. tastes a little better but it doesn't taste 6x better and most people who are not childless hipster software developers couldn't afford to eat it regularly.

Corporate chicken (esp. white meat) is very high quality protein but it’s not exactly jam packed with flavor. “Artisanal” chicken that costs $6/lb. tastes a little better but it doesn’t taste 6x better and most people who are not childless hipster software developers couldn’t afford to eat it regularly.

Tastes a little better? Dude, I had a DOG that wouldn’t eat Purdue chicken. Turned his nose up at it. But he’d chow down on the free range stuff. Purdue chicken is nasty. Tyson is even worse.

The thing is, we eat way too much meat as it is, environmentally. Industrial animal farming is grotesque. It’s shameful and disgusting. Why do we need 99 cent a pound chicken? For what? Instead of eating three pieces of chicken and one potato, eat three potatoes and one piece of chicken.

Though of course, immigration has a great deal to do with all these food issues. The U.S. population should be about 150 million. Still a lot of people, but a whole lot less than it is now.

I gave up Purdue chicken years ago when I tried to make soup from the bones and no matter how much I reduced the stock, it never tasted meaty. The really good chicken (pasture raised, heritage breed, slaughtered when older) is so expensive for us that it's a very rare treat. A decent compromise is the Costco or BJ's antibiotic free varieties, which do taste more "chickeny." But in terms of grass fed meat, I've found that absent a rare markdown where I buy as much as I can and stuff the freezer, Australian legs of lamb are $5/lb at Costco, and Aldi often has grass fed ground beef for $5.50/lb are some of the cheaper really good meats. For seafood, Costco has inexpensive clams, mussels, wild cod and skipjack canned tuna. They also stock grass fed Kerrygold butter and cheeses. If you're really vigilant about no food waste and eat seasonal produce, you can keep the costs reasonably under control and eat mostly organic animal proteins. My husband doesn't eat starches and we're feeding two adults (one pregnant/nursing) and a toddler for between $100 and $150/wk. Eat a decent amount of carbohydrates, even organic ones, and you can cut that further.

Also, on the rare occasion I've been able to source eye watteringly expensive pastured eggs, they are notably different. The shells are much, much thicker and harder to crack, which I assume is indicative of healthier, better nourished birds.

Not really, Ronnie Reagan sided with the growers over Cesar Chavez which means he supported a lot of illegal immigrant farm workers. In fact by 1980 alone about 1.5 illegal immigrants already lived in California long before NAFTA. Prop 187 also occurred before NAFTA so the New York Times has an excused since not only 1.5 people left Mexico but it is more like 8 million. Not all the 8 million were displaced by NAFTA. Gerald Ford was a good guy in my book, he was not a right winger but Right wingers helped illegal immigration like Reagan by supporting the growers. Ford's problem was bringing in too many Vietnamese.

Cynthia, I don’t deny he supported some of the Conservative causes that were eventually detrimental, say supporting the growers. He did not intend to inundate the country with non-Americans, though, like all of his presidential successors let happen. The whole reason the amnesty happened was that Reagan wanted to get the borders under control (there were still a decent amount of patriotic republicans – and even Dems. in the Feral Gov’t back then). The Congress just reneged on their part of the bargain, and we all got screwed.

Would Ford not have supported big business too, were he in office long enough? I think we was just the usual establishment Republican. That’s why they wanted him to run against Mr. Jimmy, win or lose, just like a Dole, McCain, and a Romney. They wanted to keep the real mavericks, meaning the guys that cared about real Americans, way the hell away from power. People on zerohedge think that Reagan’s being shot was a warning from the deep state – “get with the program – that was just a .22!” (It was really a near-thing that he didn’t die from this bullet, though, as I’ve read.)

The reality is that most people prefer the industrial food because of its blander flavor profile, like the more refined grains like white bread and grain fed, corporate poultry, eggs, beef, and dairy. Grain fed beef is better marbled, and has less of a gamey taste and texture than grass fed beef. Grass fed milk has a grassy taste and lingering aftertaste than many people don't like compared to the "cleaner" taste of regular, grain fed milk.

Grain fed beef is better marbled, and has less of a gamey taste and texture than grass fed beef. Grass fed milk has a grassy taste and lingering aftertaste than many people don’t like compared to the “cleaner” taste of regular, grain fed milk.

I don’t know what they feed European cattle, but a colleague from France said American beef was the best he had ever had.

Jack, Thank you for your reply and it brings up a couple of thoughts. Brazil's beef has been recently banned from import into most of Europe. If Brazil has a sustainable food crop and untapped arable land, then why not ship more immigrants and refugees there?

I read a recent article on Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants in the U.S. that was supposed to tug at the heartstrings — a woman bemoaning that her husband was being deported, which would separate her family, etc. (details fuzzy)

Unless you noticed that the woman and her husband had originally been taken in from Haiti as legal refugees by Brazil and had only illegally gone to the U.S. to, essentially, shop for better benefits.

There was no humanitarian reason they couldn’t have simply stayed in Brazil, but all of a sudden it was mean ol’ ‘murica’s fault.

The let them eat nationalism/culture etc. argument only goes so far, and the people who tend to make the argument tend not to practice what they preach and abstain from global supply chains and the like.

I agree, but I so purchase only products manufactured in the U.S.A. Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (excepting a few electronic devices it is literally impossible to obtain from a European nation; even then I make a point of purchasing products from Taiwan and Japan instead of China, etc.).

A problem is they now get you coming and going: I must sadly concede my belingings from Germany may well have been made by Turks, those from the U.S.A. by Mexicans, those from Canada by Chinese, etc. Thus, even meticulous research and principled adherence to strict requirements regariding nations of origin is increasingly a wasted effort.

In the event, the answer to the conundrum is to throw the invaders out and stem the incoming tide, and continue supporting only domestic industry and convincing others to, not to resignedly shrug and sigh “no one bothers now, so surely why not abandon the goal?”

Because of its size and its resources, the U.S.A. – perhaps uniquely among all modern nations save perhaps Russia (which lacks agricultural production; China, Brasil, and India lack energy and, for the latter two, human capital…) – is positioned to pull up the ladder and give everyone the raspberry. Yet the government doubles down on increasing her crippling interdependence at a time when economic stability and the very security and physical safety of its citizens point more than ever to the wisdom of autarky.

Brilliant observation! The U.S. is unique in that it is able to grow enough food to feed its population and - with appropriate economic policies (such as existed in the 1950s) - the ability to satisfy domestic demand for industrial goods at the same time. That is what comes from having the largest slice of land with a temperate climate in an entire continent all to ourselves.

By the way - have a look at a globe. Mexico has a lot of land in enviable temperate climatic zones too.

Jack, Thank you for your reply and it brings up a couple of thoughts. Brazil's beef has been recently banned from import into most of Europe. If Brazil has a sustainable food crop and untapped arable land, then why not ship more immigrants and refugees there?

Not enough white people there to displace and persecute, that’s why. The destruction of the race there is already continuing apace via miscegenation, so there is no incentive to accelerate it via invasion by additonal troops.

the Times does not capitalize acronyms over four letters (they only capitalize the first letter), so while the rest of the world uses NAFTA, the Times alone uses Nafta. The example cited in the column was Navy SEALs, which the Times insists on printing as Navy Seals, despite objections from readers and the Navy

This type of thing drives me nuts.

I cannot agree more. This confusing practice originates in Europe and it’s maddened me for more than a decade. It is an affectation which makes the writing less effective communication: the point of capitalising all letters in an acronym is to signal to readers that it is an acronym; removing that signal serves no other purpose than to make the writing less clear.

The example of the SEALs is illustrative because SPAWAR does in fact work with sea lions and dolphins; a headline about the navy’s work with SEALs (activity by special operators) communicates something altogether different from one about its work with seals (a new deelopment in the programme for marine mammals).

As to the U.S. Navy’s own objections being ignored: compare that disrespect for people risking their lives to defend the writers from Achmed and Muhammad the terrorists with the deference those writers would trip over themselves showing to Achmed and Muhammed: they’d be “an Oxford man,” Muslim rather than Mohammedans or Islamists, and if their idol were mentioned peace would be exhorted upon him, etc. (On the vanishingly unlikely intersectional chance they were also self-mutilated freaks, mentally ill, or perverted, they would certainly by zer, xit, etc.!).

Corporate chicken (esp. white meat) is very high quality protein but it’s not exactly jam packed with flavor. “Artisanal” chicken that costs $6/lb. tastes a little better but it doesn’t taste 6x better and most people who are not childless hipster software developers couldn’t afford to eat it regularly.

Tastes a little better? Dude, I had a DOG that wouldn't eat Purdue chicken. Turned his nose up at it. But he'd chow down on the free range stuff. Purdue chicken is nasty. Tyson is even worse.

The thing is, we eat way too much meat as it is, environmentally. Industrial animal farming is grotesque. It's shameful and disgusting. Why do we need 99 cent a pound chicken? For what? Instead of eating three pieces of chicken and one potato, eat three potatoes and one piece of chicken.

Though of course, immigration has a great deal to do with all these food issues. The U.S. population should be about 150 million. Still a lot of people, but a whole lot less than it is now.

I gave up Purdue chicken years ago when I tried to make soup from the bones and no matter how much I reduced the stock, it never tasted meaty. The really good chicken (pasture raised, heritage breed, slaughtered when older) is so expensive for us that it’s a very rare treat. A decent compromise is the Costco or BJ’s antibiotic free varieties, which do taste more “chickeny.” But in terms of grass fed meat, I’ve found that absent a rare markdown where I buy as much as I can and stuff the freezer, Australian legs of lamb are $5/lb at Costco, and Aldi often has grass fed ground beef for $5.50/lb are some of the cheaper really good meats. For seafood, Costco has inexpensive clams, mussels, wild cod and skipjack canned tuna. They also stock grass fed Kerrygold butter and cheeses. If you’re really vigilant about no food waste and eat seasonal produce, you can keep the costs reasonably under control and eat mostly organic animal proteins. My husband doesn’t eat starches and we’re feeding two adults (one pregnant/nursing) and a toddler for between $100 and $150/wk. Eat a decent amount of carbohydrates, even organic ones, and you can cut that further.

Also, on the rare occasion I’ve been able to source eye watteringly expensive pastured eggs, they are notably different. The shells are much, much thicker and harder to crack, which I assume is indicative of healthier, better nourished birds.

Aldi often has grass fed ground beef for $5.50/lb are some of the cheaper really good meats.

When you look at the recommended portion sizes, going with high quality grass fed ground beef is not that expensive, especially if you are making a large pot of chili. I also have access to ground venison from deer hunting friends and family which when mixed with the more flavorful grass fed beef makes an inexpensive tasty chili.

Still looking for stores that sell grass fed butter to supplement the inexpensive coconut oil I now use for most cooking purposes along with olive oil. Maybe I will try Costco.

My wife has kept chickens for years, and the shells are the most obvious difference from store-bought eggs - they are far thicker, and come in a variety of colors, which is kind of fun until you get used to it. (After a while, the perfectly color-matched store eggs seem somewhat miraculous). Also, the yolks tend to be more solid and brighter in color. Taste-wise, to be honest, I've never been able to tell much of a difference, but I'm no gourmand.

There has been the odd bird or two that laid thin-shelled eggs. Maybe it's health and diet, but I think it might be breeding. From the perspective of an industrial egg producer, needlessly thick shells are just a waste of nutrients, so breeding programs seeking maximum egg output would probably optimize around thinner shells.

Backyard growers tend to optimize around different traits. They care far more about the aesthetic appearance of birds, for example. Birds that are good at foraging are excellent - the more they feed themselves, the less you spend on grain. And then there are the "farmstead" breeds which, rather than being hyper-optimized as either egg-birds or meat-birds, are a reasonable compromise - nice and fat, but still pretty good layers.

It's funny to hear about expensive pastured eggs - around here, it seems like every street has a few people with backyard flocks and an honor box selling pastured eggs for $3/dozen. Given the low price, my wife doesn't even bother selling - she just keeps the flock small and gives away a couple dozen eggs a week.

CAFOs are really a phenomena of the last 25 years. Taking off in the post NAFTA years of the Clinton administration. So much for the Democrats claiming they were the party of the family farmer.

Cows are not natural grain feeders and stuffing them with corn and soybeans was once seen as a wasteful expedient to fat them up just before slaughter. Cattle CAFOs subsidies alone have cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars to produce an unhealthy unnatural product.

I gave up Purdue chicken years ago when I tried to make soup from the bones and no matter how much I reduced the stock, it never tasted meaty. The really good chicken (pasture raised, heritage breed, slaughtered when older) is so expensive for us that it's a very rare treat. A decent compromise is the Costco or BJ's antibiotic free varieties, which do taste more "chickeny." But in terms of grass fed meat, I've found that absent a rare markdown where I buy as much as I can and stuff the freezer, Australian legs of lamb are $5/lb at Costco, and Aldi often has grass fed ground beef for $5.50/lb are some of the cheaper really good meats. For seafood, Costco has inexpensive clams, mussels, wild cod and skipjack canned tuna. They also stock grass fed Kerrygold butter and cheeses. If you're really vigilant about no food waste and eat seasonal produce, you can keep the costs reasonably under control and eat mostly organic animal proteins. My husband doesn't eat starches and we're feeding two adults (one pregnant/nursing) and a toddler for between $100 and $150/wk. Eat a decent amount of carbohydrates, even organic ones, and you can cut that further.

Also, on the rare occasion I've been able to source eye watteringly expensive pastured eggs, they are notably different. The shells are much, much thicker and harder to crack, which I assume is indicative of healthier, better nourished birds.

Aldi often has grass fed ground beef for $5.50/lb are some of the cheaper really good meats.

When you look at the recommended portion sizes, going with high quality grass fed ground beef is not that expensive, especially if you are making a large pot of chili. I also have access to ground venison from deer hunting friends and family which when mixed with the more flavorful grass fed beef makes an inexpensive tasty chili.

Still looking for stores that sell grass fed butter to supplement the inexpensive coconut oil I now use for most cooking purposes along with olive oil. Maybe I will try Costco.

Trader Joe's carries Kerrygold butter as well, but it's cheaper at Costco and they cut the price even further between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It tastes completely unlike any other butter I've had. I once caught my toddler picking up a package and taking a bite when my back was turned. It's that good. Some chain groceries carry anchor brand grass fed butter too. Costco also has nice coconut oil and their Kirkland Olive oil is one of the few brands that consistently tests as not adulterated. I find the organic extra virgin has better flavor.

For efficiency's sake I switched us almost entirely to Costco for groceries and it's been a pretty good setup. They carry almost everything we care to eat regularly. It's also very economical once you're feeding a family.

Aldi often has grass fed ground beef for $5.50/lb are some of the cheaper really good meats.

When you look at the recommended portion sizes, going with high quality grass fed ground beef is not that expensive, especially if you are making a large pot of chili. I also have access to ground venison from deer hunting friends and family which when mixed with the more flavorful grass fed beef makes an inexpensive tasty chili.

Still looking for stores that sell grass fed butter to supplement the inexpensive coconut oil I now use for most cooking purposes along with olive oil. Maybe I will try Costco.

Trader Joe’s carries Kerrygold butter as well, but it’s cheaper at Costco and they cut the price even further between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It tastes completely unlike any other butter I’ve had. I once caught my toddler picking up a package and taking a bite when my back was turned. It’s that good. Some chain groceries carry anchor brand grass fed butter too. Costco also has nice coconut oil and their Kirkland Olive oil is one of the few brands that consistently tests as not adulterated. I find the organic extra virgin has better flavor.

For efficiency’s sake I switched us almost entirely to Costco for groceries and it’s been a pretty good setup. They carry almost everything we care to eat regularly. It’s also very economical once you’re feeding a family.

Amnesty was done with the help of the Senate. 33 members of the Senate in 1986 were WWII veterans, only 3 baby boomers in the Senate. The average Senator in 1986 was born in 1929.The Greatest Generation really wanted to transform America for some reason.

the 1990 Immigration act was even more damaging to America. It expanded Legal Immigration by 50% , created the H1b visa program, created the diversity Lottery and ended the English requirement for naturalization. Even in 1990 24 WWII veterans were in Congress with just 3 baby boomers. The average Senator was born in 1933 in the 101st Congress.

The Greatest Generation really wanted to transform America for some reason.

The Greatest Generation should be the most hated generation in history. They were certainly the most destructive.

Yes, that's how chicken once was in America maybe 100 years ago (minus the tropical herbs). But figure it out - if they have a flock of 2 dozen chickens then they are not eating chicken every day or in a few weeks they wouldn't have any. And that's just to feed their own family and guests and not millions of people living off the farm. You can have cheap plentiful food or tasty hand raised food but not both.

The modern Western (and now Asian, for the more prosperous countries) diet is too meat-heavy according to many nutritionists.

Oh wow. Are we back to the lower protein approach now? Throughout the 2000's it's been protein, protein, protein! I wonder what the next "better" diet will be. Beans? I think that was Bill Clinton's secret. High in fiber, low in fat.

A majority of workers in Mexico toil in the obscurity of under-the-table jobs at workshops, markets and farms for their survival.

As opposed to this reporter who is having a meaningful impact on the world.

The implication is that unless your job is registered with the government for tax-taking purposes and unless it's a free-form act of self-expression -- certainly not about survival -- you are sorely oppressed. Poor Mexican workers don't just work, they toil, and they toil in the obscurity, not in factories but in workshops. The horror.

Exactly. Toiling in the obscurity of under-the-table jobs at workshops, markets, and farms doing honest work making growing and selling things people need is prole.

Deplorable losers suffer the calumny of putting food on the table and shelter over the heads of refined people like NYT writers.

Meanwhile, working class Mexicans get married and have two kids each (on average). New York Times writers mostly grow old with their cats, surrounded by furballs while Mexicans face the indignity of playing games with their grandchildren.

And the obscurity! Can you imagine living a life where your name is never on the august pages of the Times? A sad, sad world where the only ones that remember you are your kids, their kids, all their spouses and cousins, your friendly and easygoing neighbors, and various other deplorable toilers that you toiled with. Truly awful when you could be remembered in a future century for one brief second by some 14 year old forced to look up a footnote from an old newspaper in the school library.

Compared to allowing Mexican corn farmers to gradually invest in modern methods and increase their yields. Many farmers would still have been pushed out of the industry, but at least not all at once, and the Mexican economy would have had a chance at absorbing them.

Instead, we put them in sudden competition with American industrial agriculture, with results that were not only predictable, but predicted.

Basically, they were so obsolete at corn farming they were obliterated at the first competition.

Preserving a cultural/economy that archaic, or incrementally modernizing, would effectively be creating sort of a bunch of mexican amish, anachronisms.

I think most mexican peons would rather join the modern world rather than remaining as part of a living archaic cultural anthropology exhibit.

Right. So whatever it is you do, suppose you’ve been doing it for decades, and you have your own business, and by all accounts you’ve been doing everything right and working hard and making sacrifices to support your family. And then along comes some vastly superior competition who puts you out of business, and you need to get rid of your business and leave everyone you know and move to some place you’ve never heard of so you can do manual labor on someone else’s farm. And you’d be grateful. Thank you, dear competitor! Before, when I had my farm and my family and my community and stability, I was obsolete – the very worst thing you can be! Praise NAFTA, holy NAFTA, you have shown me the error of my obsolete ways!

You are romanticizing subsistence farming. In the best of times it barely supports you - enough to eat if the weather is good and there are no crop failures due to disease, insects, etc. but very little left over to buy material goods. By material goods I don't mean SUVs and flat screen TVs, I mean stuff like clothing and shoes and indoor plumbing. It was right and proper for Mexico to gradually move past subsistence farming like every other country that has developed its economy. It was wrong for them to do it all on one day and dump their surplus population on us.

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?
Their lifestyle was over one way or another.

That's pretty freakin' trolling, haughty and dismissive and I have no love for Mexican invaders. Their lifestyle was good for another forty years and a gradual transition to more mechanized farming. Then we would not have had so much illegal immigration. Same as US policies greatly accelerated outsourcing and decimation of the US industrial base. Notice how the Japanese did not do this. They outsource old industries but keep their newer world class ones for who? Why for the Japanese people.

The whole idea of some US factories going abroad very slowly and to retain tariffs would have been OK

No to mention the Japanese still have small family farms that grow/cultivate high quality and very expensive produce.

I gave up Purdue chicken years ago when I tried to make soup from the bones and no matter how much I reduced the stock, it never tasted meaty. The really good chicken (pasture raised, heritage breed, slaughtered when older) is so expensive for us that it's a very rare treat. A decent compromise is the Costco or BJ's antibiotic free varieties, which do taste more "chickeny." But in terms of grass fed meat, I've found that absent a rare markdown where I buy as much as I can and stuff the freezer, Australian legs of lamb are $5/lb at Costco, and Aldi often has grass fed ground beef for $5.50/lb are some of the cheaper really good meats. For seafood, Costco has inexpensive clams, mussels, wild cod and skipjack canned tuna. They also stock grass fed Kerrygold butter and cheeses. If you're really vigilant about no food waste and eat seasonal produce, you can keep the costs reasonably under control and eat mostly organic animal proteins. My husband doesn't eat starches and we're feeding two adults (one pregnant/nursing) and a toddler for between $100 and $150/wk. Eat a decent amount of carbohydrates, even organic ones, and you can cut that further.

Also, on the rare occasion I've been able to source eye watteringly expensive pastured eggs, they are notably different. The shells are much, much thicker and harder to crack, which I assume is indicative of healthier, better nourished birds.

My wife has kept chickens for years, and the shells are the most obvious difference from store-bought eggs – they are far thicker, and come in a variety of colors, which is kind of fun until you get used to it. (After a while, the perfectly color-matched store eggs seem somewhat miraculous). Also, the yolks tend to be more solid and brighter in color. Taste-wise, to be honest, I’ve never been able to tell much of a difference, but I’m no gourmand.

There has been the odd bird or two that laid thin-shelled eggs. Maybe it’s health and diet, but I think it might be breeding. From the perspective of an industrial egg producer, needlessly thick shells are just a waste of nutrients, so breeding programs seeking maximum egg output would probably optimize around thinner shells.

Backyard growers tend to optimize around different traits. They care far more about the aesthetic appearance of birds, for example. Birds that are good at foraging are excellent – the more they feed themselves, the less you spend on grain. And then there are the “farmstead” breeds which, rather than being hyper-optimized as either egg-birds or meat-birds, are a reasonable compromise – nice and fat, but still pretty good layers.

It’s funny to hear about expensive pastured eggs – around here, it seems like every street has a few people with backyard flocks and an honor box selling pastured eggs for $3/dozen. Given the low price, my wife doesn’t even bother selling – she just keeps the flock small and gives away a couple dozen eggs a week.

As far as the shells go (and remember they go in the trash), the thickness of the shell is a function of the age of the hen. Laying an egg almost every day depletes the calcium from a hen's body and it's impossible for them to keep up no matter how much calcium you feed them (they literally get fed ground up calcite rocks or oyster shells, which they use not only for dietary purposes but also store in their gizzard for use in grinding up food) , so eventually the shells get thinner.

If you want to make chicken soup with some flavor, find a soup hen (these are used up laying hens). Sometimes you find them in ethnic markets. They are too tough to roast or grill but if you cook them in liquid for a long time they are edible. The frying chickens we get in the supermarket are pre-pubescent chickens as few as 6 or 7 weeks old (a few more weeks for the roasters) so they haven't had enough time to develop any flavor (but they are very tender). They grow very fast as a result of breeding and a rich diet (no chemicals). Barnyard chickens take much longer to reach the same weight so they have more flavor. Another secret of great soup is chicken feet - very gelatinous. Again ethnic markets are the place to look.

Compared to allowing Mexican corn farmers to gradually invest in modern methods and increase their yields. Many farmers would still have been pushed out of the industry, but at least not all at once, and the Mexican economy would have had a chance at absorbing them.

Instead, we put them in sudden competition with American industrial agriculture, with results that were not only predictable, but predicted.

Basically, they were so obsolete at corn farming they were obliterated at the first competition.

Preserving a cultural/economy that archaic, or incrementally modernizing, would effectively be creating sort of a bunch of mexican amish, anachronisms.

I think most mexican peons would rather join the modern world rather than remaining as part of a living archaic cultural anthropology exhibit.

It was these corn farmers who were fueling Mexico's high birth rates. Having them move off their farms ultimately will lead to a less crowded and more prosperous Mexico and fewer illegal immigrants. Indeed, we have had roughly no net immigration from Mexico this decade.

That is an arrogant statement . None of knows what the future holds and it maybe that the time will come when some of us might envy "a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick" . And it seems like hubris that people who get those same "peons" to pick their veggies and mow their lawns should be so contemptuous of them .

My wife has kept chickens for years, and the shells are the most obvious difference from store-bought eggs - they are far thicker, and come in a variety of colors, which is kind of fun until you get used to it. (After a while, the perfectly color-matched store eggs seem somewhat miraculous). Also, the yolks tend to be more solid and brighter in color. Taste-wise, to be honest, I've never been able to tell much of a difference, but I'm no gourmand.

There has been the odd bird or two that laid thin-shelled eggs. Maybe it's health and diet, but I think it might be breeding. From the perspective of an industrial egg producer, needlessly thick shells are just a waste of nutrients, so breeding programs seeking maximum egg output would probably optimize around thinner shells.

Backyard growers tend to optimize around different traits. They care far more about the aesthetic appearance of birds, for example. Birds that are good at foraging are excellent - the more they feed themselves, the less you spend on grain. And then there are the "farmstead" breeds which, rather than being hyper-optimized as either egg-birds or meat-birds, are a reasonable compromise - nice and fat, but still pretty good layers.

It's funny to hear about expensive pastured eggs - around here, it seems like every street has a few people with backyard flocks and an honor box selling pastured eggs for $3/dozen. Given the low price, my wife doesn't even bother selling - she just keeps the flock small and gives away a couple dozen eggs a week.

Taste-wise, to be honest, I’ve never been able to tell much of a difference,

As far as the shells go (and remember they go in the trash), the thickness of the shell is a function of the age of the hen. Laying an egg almost every day depletes the calcium from a hen’s body and it’s impossible for them to keep up no matter how much calcium you feed them (they literally get fed ground up calcite rocks or oyster shells, which they use not only for dietary purposes but also store in their gizzard for use in grinding up food) , so eventually the shells get thinner.

If you want to make chicken soup with some flavor, find a soup hen (these are used up laying hens). Sometimes you find them in ethnic markets. They are too tough to roast or grill but if you cook them in liquid for a long time they are edible. The frying chickens we get in the supermarket are pre-pubescent chickens as few as 6 or 7 weeks old (a few more weeks for the roasters) so they haven’t had enough time to develop any flavor (but they are very tender). They grow very fast as a result of breeding and a rich diet (no chemicals). Barnyard chickens take much longer to reach the same weight so they have more flavor. Another secret of great soup is chicken feet – very gelatinous. Again ethnic markets are the place to look.

In Chinese markets near me these are normally sold as "elderly chickens," and the soup is GREAT. My husband and baby can blow through a gallon of soup a week in the winter, and the easy way to do it, especially for tenderizing the old birds, is a pressure cooker. The new electric models are much less scary than the old ones from the seventies, and you just punch some buttons and walk away. Mine is called an Instant Pot and I think it was $70 on Amazon. Well worth it. The pressure cooking also pulls a lot of gelatin out of the bones, giving the stock much better mouthfeel. In a pinch, you can also keep powdered gelatin (sold in the baking aisle near the Jello) and dissolve it into the soup to improve texture. Note for pregnant women: if your hair, nails and skin are getting crappy, a bowl of gelatin heavy soup a day seems to help me a lot.

Right. So whatever it is you do, suppose you've been doing it for decades, and you have your own business, and by all accounts you've been doing everything right and working hard and making sacrifices to support your family. And then along comes some vastly superior competition who puts you out of business, and you need to get rid of your business and leave everyone you know and move to some place you've never heard of so you can do manual labor on someone else's farm. And you'd be grateful. Thank you, dear competitor! Before, when I had my farm and my family and my community and stability, I was obsolete - the very worst thing you can be! Praise NAFTA, holy NAFTA, you have shown me the error of my obsolete ways!

Ever read Grapes of Wrath by any chance?

You are romanticizing subsistence farming. In the best of times it barely supports you – enough to eat if the weather is good and there are no crop failures due to disease, insects, etc. but very little left over to buy material goods. By material goods I don’t mean SUVs and flat screen TVs, I mean stuff like clothing and shoes and indoor plumbing. It was right and proper for Mexico to gradually move past subsistence farming like every other country that has developed its economy. It was wrong for them to do it all on one day and dump their surplus population on us.

I don't honestly know what it was like in Chiapas in 1990. They were dealing with Zapatista violence too weren't they?

The USA was settled by subsistence farmers using draught power. They're the folks who built all those beautiful farmhouses around New England. And they wore nice shoes.

Nowadays we tend to equate subsistence farming with subsistence-farming-in-poor-countries, because pretty much everywhere with a high standard of living adopted mechanized agriculture and highly-specialized economies. But it isn't a law of nature that you can't have a respectable standard of living in a society where 90% of families are homesteaders. You do need large families where everyone works like crazy. But we used to be good at that, and supposedly so are the migrants from Chiapas.

most of the so-called 60s was lead by men born prior to the baby boom. Not just the notable cultural icons like Bobby Dylan, Jim Morrison, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, The Grateful Dead, Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Hunter S. Thompson, jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepard, etc... in fact it is hard to finds a notable boomer among the important figures of the 60s, they were lead by the Silent generation, as was the Civil Rights movement, the anti-War movement, the Femisnists movement...

Politics were dominated by the Greatest Generation until 1992, when most of the political damage had been done. Boomers do not deserve much of the blame. The Silent Generation did more damage and had more political power until the late 90s. Even in the year 2000 the average Senator was 61 years old, born in 1939, 7 years before the boomers.

The modern Western (and now Asian, for the more prosperous countries) diet is too meat-heavy according to many nutritionists.

Oh wow. Are we back to the lower protein approach now? Throughout the 2000′s it’s been protein, protein, protein! I wonder what the next “better” diet will be. Beans? I think that was Bill Clinton’s secret. High in fiber, low in fat.

1m African migrants may be en route to Europe, says former UK envoyhttps://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/apr/02/1m-african-migrants-may-be-en-route-to-europe-says-former-uk-envoy

More than ONE MILLION migrants hoping to cross to Europe are 'in the pipeline' in Libya: Senior diplomat warns EU has done 'too little, too late' to tackle the crisishttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4365870/Over-ONE-MILLION-migrants-pipeline-Libya.html

Blockades are pretty effective, aren’t they? Not to mention capturing and returning any such vessels evading the blockade. If Europeans are serious about protecting themselves, this would not be a problem.

Indeed, anything resembling truth is buried deep inside The New York Pravda.

This time the truth is that not only are the working people of the United States engaged in a struggle for quality of life, but their counterparts on the other side are as well. All this is happening while our mutual owners and feeders move labor around at will.

Marxists would call this a class struggle, when in fact it is simply a renewed fight for independence, for the power of Citizens to run their own country for their own benefit. Inside our borders, we should be free to profit and negotiate and legislate (as we have at times!)

As a distinct organ of the human world's body, the US functioned beautifully. Top-down trade deals like NAFTA drove a knife through that organ, so that it now bleeds out and lets infection in.

Corporate agriculture is just as much of a deadly parasite as Carlos Slim's cellphone empire and the finance-insurance economy. Together, they all benefit from NAFTA and Pravda at the expense of everyone else.

Now it is clear that they suck the blood out of both organs of this particular, organic duality.

It's a good thing Steve reads that far, so we don't have to.

We get the Times every day. I look at the headlines and if something sounds interesting, I read the bottom paragraphs first. Started doing this about five years ago.

You might have an argument for beef, where the fat is distributed in the tissue, but I will speak about the industry that I am familiar with, which is the poultry industry.

Before there was industrial chicken there was hardly any chicken at all - you can't raise chickens on a large scale feeding them grass (they are not ruminants) or pecking at bugs. You can have a handful running around the barnyard but that's about it. That's why chicken was once a very special treat, not an everyday food. (In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye jokes that if a poor man eats a chicken then one of them is sick.)

"Organic" chickens get fed the same corn as any other chickens. "Pasture raised" chickens STILL get fed the same corn. Any chicken you buy is going to be corn fed - there's no other way to produce them on the scale needed to feed a large population. So you can pay a lot more money and still eat the same product like a hipster sucker. And the fat in chicken is not marbled in the meat but mostly in the skin and in distinct clumps that melt when the chicken is cooked, so if you eat boneless white meat (the most popular form) you are not getting much fat of any kind, good or bad. Chicken and eggs are both very high quality protein and also very inexpensive and you could do a lot worse than eating them, even in their "industrial" form.

That is an arrogant statement . None of knows what the future holds and it maybe that the time will come when some of us might envy "a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick" . And it seems like hubris that people who get those same "peons" to pick their veggies and mow their lawns should be so contemptuous of them .

Well said. Having agricultural land sounds really good to me, especially at this stage of life (I am an old fogey after all). One of my son’s friends was wise enough when the market crashed to buy a parcel of land in the Hudson Valley that he rents out to local farmers. That was a great purchase as it also has a small house on it that can be easily made into an all-year residence.

As far as the shells go (and remember they go in the trash), the thickness of the shell is a function of the age of the hen. Laying an egg almost every day depletes the calcium from a hen's body and it's impossible for them to keep up no matter how much calcium you feed them (they literally get fed ground up calcite rocks or oyster shells, which they use not only for dietary purposes but also store in their gizzard for use in grinding up food) , so eventually the shells get thinner.

If you want to make chicken soup with some flavor, find a soup hen (these are used up laying hens). Sometimes you find them in ethnic markets. They are too tough to roast or grill but if you cook them in liquid for a long time they are edible. The frying chickens we get in the supermarket are pre-pubescent chickens as few as 6 or 7 weeks old (a few more weeks for the roasters) so they haven't had enough time to develop any flavor (but they are very tender). They grow very fast as a result of breeding and a rich diet (no chemicals). Barnyard chickens take much longer to reach the same weight so they have more flavor. Another secret of great soup is chicken feet - very gelatinous. Again ethnic markets are the place to look.

In Chinese markets near me these are normally sold as “elderly chickens,” and the soup is GREAT. My husband and baby can blow through a gallon of soup a week in the winter, and the easy way to do it, especially for tenderizing the old birds, is a pressure cooker. The new electric models are much less scary than the old ones from the seventies, and you just punch some buttons and walk away. Mine is called an Instant Pot and I think it was $70 on Amazon. Well worth it. The pressure cooking also pulls a lot of gelatin out of the bones, giving the stock much better mouthfeel. In a pinch, you can also keep powdered gelatin (sold in the baking aisle near the Jello) and dissolve it into the soup to improve texture. Note for pregnant women: if your hair, nails and skin are getting crappy, a bowl of gelatin heavy soup a day seems to help me a lot.

I endorse the pressure cooker for soups, stews, beans, etc. The new electric ones are especially idiot-proof. The Instant Pots go on sale for $69 a couple of times a year - the rest of the time they are more.

Powdered gelatin is cheating. Go for the chicken feet. The same Asian markets that sells "old chickens" will have them.

Yes, that's how chicken once was in America maybe 100 years ago (minus the tropical herbs). But figure it out - if they have a flock of 2 dozen chickens then they are not eating chicken every day or in a few weeks they wouldn't have any. And that's just to feed their own family and guests and not millions of people living off the farm. You can have cheap plentiful food or tasty hand raised food but not both.

Most of the flavor in the chicken we eat comes from the herbs, garlic, spices, and citrus juice that we add to it. For people on a tight budget, and with little time, the rotisserie chicken sold at a Sam’s Club, for instance, is a Godsend.

Grain fed beef is better marbled, and has less of a gamey taste and texture than grass fed beef. Grass fed milk has a grassy taste and lingering aftertaste than many people don’t like compared to the “cleaner” taste of regular, grain fed milk.

I don't know what they feed European cattle, but a colleague from France said American beef was the best he had ever had.

I agree, but I so purchase only products manufactured in the U.S.A. Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (excepting a few electronic devices it is literally impossible to obtain from a European nation; even then I make a point of purchasing products from Taiwan and Japan instead of China, etc.).

A problem is they now get you coming and going: I must sadly concede my belingings from Germany may well have been made by Turks, those from the U.S.A. by Mexicans, those from Canada by Chinese, etc. Thus, even meticulous research and principled adherence to strict requirements regariding nations of origin is increasingly a wasted effort.

In the event, the answer to the conundrum is to throw the invaders out and stem the incoming tide, and continue supporting only domestic industry and convincing others to, not to resignedly shrug and sigh "no one bothers now, so surely why not abandon the goal?"

Because of its size and its resources, the U.S.A. – perhaps uniquely among all modern nations save perhaps Russia (which lacks agricultural production; China, Brasil, and India lack energy and, for the latter two, human capital...) – is positioned to pull up the ladder and give everyone the raspberry. Yet the government doubles down on increasing her crippling interdependence at a time when economic stability and the very security and physical safety of its citizens point more than ever to the wisdom of autarky.

Brilliant observation! The U.S. is unique in that it is able to grow enough food to feed its population and – with appropriate economic policies (such as existed in the 1950s) – the ability to satisfy domestic demand for industrial goods at the same time. That is what comes from having the largest slice of land with a temperate climate in an entire continent all to ourselves.

By the way – have a look at a globe. Mexico has a lot of land in enviable temperate climatic zones too.

You are romanticizing subsistence farming. In the best of times it barely supports you - enough to eat if the weather is good and there are no crop failures due to disease, insects, etc. but very little left over to buy material goods. By material goods I don't mean SUVs and flat screen TVs, I mean stuff like clothing and shoes and indoor plumbing. It was right and proper for Mexico to gradually move past subsistence farming like every other country that has developed its economy. It was wrong for them to do it all on one day and dump their surplus population on us.

I don’t honestly know what it was like in Chiapas in 1990. They were dealing with Zapatista violence too weren’t they?

The USA was settled by subsistence farmers using draught power. They’re the folks who built all those beautiful farmhouses around New England. And they wore nice shoes.

Nowadays we tend to equate subsistence farming with subsistence-farming-in-poor-countries, because pretty much everywhere with a high standard of living adopted mechanized agriculture and highly-specialized economies. But it isn’t a law of nature that you can’t have a respectable standard of living in a society where 90% of families are homesteaders. You do need large families where everyone works like crazy. But we used to be good at that, and supposedly so are the migrants from Chiapas.

France's wild hamsters being turned into 'crazed cannibals' by diet of corn

Starving rodents in north-eastern France are suffering from vitamin deficiencies that prompt them to eat their own young

I read 30 years ago that one reason people overeat is because they are unconsciously seeking the nutrients that bad food does not provide them.

I always thought this made sense and I don’t know why it isn’t bruited about more.

But note: one food manufacturer in Asia have told me that people who ate well in their youth (i.e. got good food from their mothers) will seek “dense” food but the modern young who graze on pot noodles etc. don’t miss it because they have never had it.

In Chinese markets near me these are normally sold as "elderly chickens," and the soup is GREAT. My husband and baby can blow through a gallon of soup a week in the winter, and the easy way to do it, especially for tenderizing the old birds, is a pressure cooker. The new electric models are much less scary than the old ones from the seventies, and you just punch some buttons and walk away. Mine is called an Instant Pot and I think it was $70 on Amazon. Well worth it. The pressure cooking also pulls a lot of gelatin out of the bones, giving the stock much better mouthfeel. In a pinch, you can also keep powdered gelatin (sold in the baking aisle near the Jello) and dissolve it into the soup to improve texture. Note for pregnant women: if your hair, nails and skin are getting crappy, a bowl of gelatin heavy soup a day seems to help me a lot.

I endorse the pressure cooker for soups, stews, beans, etc. The new electric ones are especially idiot-proof. The Instant Pots go on sale for $69 a couple of times a year – the rest of the time they are more.

Powdered gelatin is cheating. Go for the chicken feet. The same Asian markets that sells “old chickens” will have them.

The United States has likely reached a grim but historic milestone in the war on terror: 1 million veterans injured from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan...
All that can be said with any certainty is that as of last December more than 900,000 service men and women had been treated at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics since returning from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the monthly rate of new patients to these facilities as of the end of 2012 was around 10,000. Beyond that, the picture gets murky. In March, VA abruptly stopped releasing statistics on non-fatal war casualties to the public.

According to the Pentagon, more than half to two-thirds of Americans killed or wounded in combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been victims of IED explosions.

Half a million US soldiers have suffered brain damage in Iraq.

http://www.parapundit.com/archives/008624.html

A team of investigators have shown evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in brain tissue from blast-exposed military service personnel.
Laboratory experiments conducted at Boston University, New York Medical College (NYMC) and the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System demonstrated that exposure to a single blast equivalent to a typical improvised explosive device (IED) results in CTE and long-term brain impairments that accompany the disease. They also found that the blast wind, not the shock wave, from the IED blast leads to traumatic brain injury (TBI) and long-term consequences, including CTE.

This research, which represents the first case series of postmortem brains from U.S. military personnel who were exposed to a blast and/or a concussive injury, will be published online May 16 by Science Translational Medicine.

The number of US soldiers exposed to IED blasts: about 460,000. That's a lot of brain damage. Clearly, these wars did far more harm to America than they were worth. We will pay for their costs for decades to come and those costs will come in many forms. How about soldiers made violent (toward family or strangers) by brain damage? Or soldiers driven to drink or drugs? Or soldiers unable to hold jobs? These wars did great damage to the American nation.

CTE, which can only be diagnosed postmortem, is a progressive neurodegenerative brain disorder that has been reported in athletes with multiple concussions or subconcussive injuries. In early stages, CTE is characterized by the presence of abnormal deposits of a protein called tau in the form of neurofibrillary tangles, glial tangles and neuropil threads throughout the brain. These tau lesions eventually lead to brain cell death. CTE has clinical features in common with TBI, including psychiatric symptoms and long-term cognitive disability involving memory and learning deficits. TBI can impact military personnel exposed to an explosive blast and may affect approximately 20 percent of the 2.3 million servicemen and women deployed since 2001.

These figures were compiled years ago. So undoubtedly the numbers are much higher now.

Over 1 million soldiers injured in the "War on Terror" (Afghanistan, Iraq).
Over 500,000 soldiers have suffered brain damage from the "War on Terror."

That is the toll of the last decade and half.

Saudi terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11. In response, we invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and a lot of other countries (with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia). Now huge numbers of soldiers are injured and mentally damaged for life.

Then people ask why so many whites are getting addicted to drugs and painkillers, or committing suicide. It's obvious that the these soldier injuries and mental damage often require painkillers to deal with, which is what is fueling much of the opioid epidemic. It's also obvious that many injured or mentally damaged individuals get depressed and kill themselves. I bet a lot of these soldiers end up getting their friends and relatives addicted too.

"War on Terror" = White Death

By the way, the entire phrase "War on Terror" is a totally Orweillian phrase. How exactly does one fight a "war on terror"? How does one win such a war? Why are we fighting this "war on terror" against innocent countries that never attacked us on 9/11 (Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria)? Why doesn't the "War on Terror" target the country that supplied that terrorists and funded them (Saudi Arabia)? Why has this war lasted over 15 years but WWII only lasted 6 years?

Most posters here want to complain about the White Death, but they have nothing to say about the factors that have produced this rise in mortality.

-Nothing to say about the "War on Terror"
-Nothing to say about Big Pharma
-Nothing to say on pill mills
-Nothing to say on lack of healthcare and drug treatment
-Nothing to say about our punitive approach and the War on Drugs
-Nothing to say about how "Socialist" Europeans somehow have evaded this White Death
-Nothing to say about how opium production skyrocketed after the Taliban were destroyed

I do CTE research and have contributed to studies in the field. I saw the original results of IEDs (and experienced them directly) as an FMF and FMFQO. My doctoral research is in a specific area of TBI, PCS and PPCS and my MD specialty is in neurosurgery. I deal in combat casualty care, so I have some experience with brain damage, and what you say about it is broadly correct, with the acknowledgement that our wars are politicized, with one side wanting to exaggerate the harm they have caused while the other side wants to minimize it.
Suffice it to say that it’s wiser to err on the side of the larger numbers of individuals suffering from undiagnosed brain damage, often in very subtle ways. “He’s just not the same person I knew since he came back from [Iraq, AFG, Viet Nam, Korea, the Pacific, Europe, ...],” is an old lament, and one that we now are learning is the result of physical injury to the brain, and not just due to emotional stress.
We’ve come a long way from the days when John Hersey, writing Into the Valley, about a Marine unit on Guadalcanal, could marvel at men who seemed uninjured and physically sound, who suddenly collapsed and died in the aftermath of mortar and artillery shelling, while corpsmen were helpless to save them.

I do CTE research and have contributed to studies in the field. I saw the original results of IEDs (and experienced them directly) as an FMF and FMFQO. My doctoral research is in a specific area of TBI, PCS and PPCS and my MD specialty is in neurosurgery. I deal in combat casualty care, so I have some experience with brain damage, and what you say about it is broadly correct, with the acknowledgement that our wars are politicized, with one side wanting to exaggerate the harm they have caused while the other side wants to minimize it. Suffice it to say that it's wiser to err on the side of the larger numbers of individuals suffering from undiagnosed brain damage, often in very subtle ways. "He's just not the same person I knew since he came back from [Iraq, AFG, Viet Nam, Korea, the Pacific, Europe, ...]," is an old lament, and one that we now are learning is the result of physical injury to the brain, and not just due to emotional stress.We've come a long way from the days when John Hersey, writing Into the Valley, about a Marine unit on Guadalcanal, could marvel at men who seemed uninjured and physically sound, who suddenly collapsed and died in the aftermath of mortar and artillery shelling, while corpsmen were helpless to save them.

The actual # injured by IED was 31,000. Most of the rest were "injured" but didn't even know it (maybe until it is time to claim disability). Now 31,000 is bad enough (in the past many of these would have died, now they just have to live with horrific injuries for the rest of their life) but making up phony #s in the millions is not helpful.

These figures are from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Hardly a partisan, anti-war source. After releasing these figures, the DVA stopped releasing new numbers.

I agree there are people with agenda. It’s just that they’re working to suppress the numbers. The same way they concocted evidence of WMDs in Iraq (google “yellowcake”) and Iraq’s links to 9/11 (all the hijackers were from Saudi, Egypt, and UAE). The people with the agenda have been lying for years and continue to lie about the real costs of the war.

The Bush administration once claimed the Iraq War would cost only $50 billion and that it’d be paid for by oil revenue. The real long-term cost has been projected to $5 trillion, none of that paid for through oil. So roughly 100x the projected cost. The media have hardly discussed this, and neither have the political class. That’s an agenda.

The IED injuries aren’t always apparent. Not unless someone notices something and goes into the doctor to complain. The reality is that over 500,000 have experienced mental trauma from IED explosions. Only a small percentage may have reported symptoms, but that’s likely because a lot of troops haven’t noticed yet. It often takes years for full blown problems to manifest themselves.

Lots of soldiers get hurt in war, but are still healthy enough to continue. It's only months (and sometimes) years before their injuries become apparent.

In football, lots of players play injured. Years later, they feel the full affect of what they did to their bodies. There's a lot of pressure to not claim and play through the pain. I'm sure the same is true for troops.

These figures are from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Hardly a partisan, anti-war source. After releasing these figures, the DVA stopped releasing new numbers.

I agree there are people with agenda. It's just that they're working to suppress the numbers. The same way they concocted evidence of WMDs in Iraq (google "yellowcake") and Iraq's links to 9/11 (all the hijackers were from Saudi, Egypt, and UAE). The people with the agenda have been lying for years and continue to lie about the real costs of the war.

The Bush administration once claimed the Iraq War would cost only $50 billion and that it'd be paid for by oil revenue. The real long-term cost has been projected to $5 trillion, none of that paid for through oil. So roughly 100x the projected cost. The media have hardly discussed this, and neither have the political class. That's an agenda.

The IED injuries aren't always apparent. Not unless someone notices something and goes into the doctor to complain. The reality is that over 500,000 have experienced mental trauma from IED explosions. Only a small percentage may have reported symptoms, but that's likely because a lot of troops haven't noticed yet. It often takes years for full blown problems to manifest themselves.

Lots of soldiers get hurt in war, but are still healthy enough to continue. It’s only months (and sometimes) years before their injuries become apparent.

In football, lots of players play injured. Years later, they feel the full affect of what they did to their bodies. There’s a lot of pressure to not claim and play through the pain. I’m sure the same is true for troops.

Oh wow. Are we back to the lower protein approach now? Throughout the 2000's it's been protein, protein, protein! I wonder what the next "better" diet will be. Beans? I think that was Bill Clinton's secret. High in fiber, low in fat.

Dietary advice is so enriching.

Excess of anything is bad. Eating a 20 oz steak with no veggies is not exactly good for the body.

I agree, but I so purchase only products manufactured in the U.S.A. Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (excepting a few electronic devices it is literally impossible to obtain from a European nation; even then I make a point of purchasing products from Taiwan and Japan instead of China, etc.).

A problem is they now get you coming and going: I must sadly concede my belingings from Germany may well have been made by Turks, those from the U.S.A. by Mexicans, those from Canada by Chinese, etc. Thus, even meticulous research and principled adherence to strict requirements regariding nations of origin is increasingly a wasted effort.

In the event, the answer to the conundrum is to throw the invaders out and stem the incoming tide, and continue supporting only domestic industry and convincing others to, not to resignedly shrug and sigh "no one bothers now, so surely why not abandon the goal?"

Because of its size and its resources, the U.S.A. – perhaps uniquely among all modern nations save perhaps Russia (which lacks agricultural production; China, Brasil, and India lack energy and, for the latter two, human capital...) – is positioned to pull up the ladder and give everyone the raspberry. Yet the government doubles down on increasing her crippling interdependence at a time when economic stability and the very security and physical safety of its citizens point more than ever to the wisdom of autarky.

Which manufactured goods are you buying from Australia and New Zealand?

The big European manufacturers have plants and suppliers all over the world. German industry has a major presence in China.

I cannot think of anything I have bought from Australia ir New Zealand offhand (excepting perhaps the music of Keith Urban and the films of George Miller). Nor have I anything from Lithuania (excepting a good friend!) or San Marino. I indicate only that these are among the only places from which I will purchase products because I am only interested in benefitting other Europeans.

Large multinational firms' operations throughout the world are irrelevant to my efforts. When possible, I purchase from firms not part of such conglomerates. In other cases, I limit purchases to things produced by firms run by Europeans and to their products produced in European nations (if such granular data were available, I would further delimit myself to products made by European workers). For example, New Balance manufacture shoes in Viet Nam and in the U.S.A. (the latter in part because of their contracts supplying athletic shoes to the American military), and BMW manufacture engines in both Germany and China. My shoes and engines come from America and Germany. Better still if I could support entirely only European operations, but it is sadly not possible to do so in many cases, so I do all I can without living as a subsistence farmer in the mountains or joining the Amish....

(It is worth noting that my things are all of far superior quality. Socks made in the U.S.A. and Germany last me years and years; my experience of those from China and Viet Nam was that they may last one year....)

It is rather like Clinton's trade actions steamrollering Haitian rice producers in favor of Florida rice growers, leading to many Haitian rice farmer leaving the country side and moving to Port au Prince, and thus probably increasing the number of people living in substandard homes who were killed in the earthquake disaster of 2010.

This in turn contributed to an increase in Haitians fleeing the country, first to Brazil, whose economy has collapsed somewhat since the Olympics and World Cup, eventually leading to the current situation of refugee camps crowed with thousands of Haitians on the Mexican side of the border in Tijuana where they are being helped by Mexican churches.

And we pay much higher prices for sugar than the rest of the world so wealthy sugar growers in Florida can stay in business.

So, in return for $2.6 billion in corn sales, plus other crops, NAFTA put 1.9 million Mexican peons out of work, many of whom illegally migrated to the U.S., where taxpayers are paying for their children’s education, their medical care, and their imprisonment and food stamps.

What kind of deal is that?

As always, compared to what?

Is being a peon on a patch of godforsaken land planting corn with a stick a vision of the future for anyone?

Their lifestyle was over one way or another.

I’d come at it differently.

What made corn so profitable wasn’t that some Mexicans domesticated teosinte 8,000 years ago (or whatever) and others worked with it as well.

What made corn such a source of so many calories for so many carbon units (human and livestock) was Mendelian genetics-based breeding programs of the early 20th century.

You've always suggested that Tina Fey was a bit less deluded than the typical Hollywood liberal, so I was curious what you thought of her calling out white women - and, particularly, colleged-educated white women - for either voting for Trump and not continuing to protest Trump. (What she wants is somewhat vague.)

“The thing that I kind of keep focusing on is the idea that we sort of need to hold the edges, that it’s sort of like a lot of this election was turned by kinda white college-educated women who would now maybe like to forget about this election and go back to watching HGTV and I would want to urge them, ‘You can’t look away,'” Fey said

Looks like the leaders of the Nice White Ladies are getting nervous that they're losing their grip on white women and are cracking the herd whip to get them back into line.

White women are coming under increased pressure these days. Blacks and Hispanics were bitching at them during the women's march thing and now Hollywood is coming down on them. Makes you wonder if college-educated white women will ever notice that their place on the victim totem poll is falling and that they might want to join the team of their husbands and sons.

Where's Whiskey when you need him.

I’m kind of surprised at Tina Fey here; 30 Rock made fun of a lot of stuff. But that’s when BHO was the president.

By the way, according to the WaPo article, corn (maize) yield is almost quadruple the wheat yield in calories per acre.

Isn’t that a refutation of the lactose-tolerance-allowed-Europeans-to-win-the-world theory? If the idea is that lactose tolerance freed Europeans from some marginally crucial amount of work to feed themselves that then became their competitive advantage in the world, then the massive productivity advantage of corn over wheat should have made the American Indians into world bestriding conquerors and civilizers.

Only it didn’t. Somewhat the reverse, really.

When the (wheat eating) Spaniards reached the New World the (maize eating) natives were still more or less stone age. No bronze, no iron, no wheel, no sail. All the raw materials were there, but they never used them. What had the dominant civilization, the Aztecs, used their massive 4x food cultivar advantage for? Mainly human sacrifice and cannibalism.

So, clearly all the Jared Diamond-style theories that some small environmental advantage allowed the Europeans to break out ahead of everyone else is just corn-pone status signalling.

Which manufactured goods are you buying from Australia and New Zealand?

The big European manufacturers have plants and suppliers all over the world. German industry has a major presence in China.

I cannot think of anything I have bought from Australia ir New Zealand offhand (excepting perhaps the music of Keith Urban and the films of George Miller). Nor have I anything from Lithuania (excepting a good friend!) or San Marino. I indicate only that these are among the only places from which I will purchase products because I am only interested in benefitting other Europeans.

Large multinational firms’ operations throughout the world are irrelevant to my efforts. When possible, I purchase from firms not part of such conglomerates. In other cases, I limit purchases to things produced by firms run by Europeans and to their products produced in European nations (if such granular data were available, I would further delimit myself to products made by European workers). For example, New Balance manufacture shoes in Viet Nam and in the U.S.A. (the latter in part because of their contracts supplying athletic shoes to the American military), and BMW manufacture engines in both Germany and China. My shoes and engines come from America and Germany. Better still if I could support entirely only European operations, but it is sadly not possible to do so in many cases, so I do all I can without living as a subsistence farmer in the mountains or joining the Amish….

(It is worth noting that my things are all of far superior quality. Socks made in the U.S.A. and Germany last me years and years; my experience of those from China and Viet Nam was that they may last one year….)

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